Black Hills

Chapter 1 Along the Greasy Grass

PAHA SAPA PULLS HIS HAND BACK SHARPLY BUT NOT BEFORE HE feels the rattlesnake-strike shock of the dying Wasicun’s ghost leaping into his fingers and flowing up his arm and into his chest. The boy lurches back in horror as the ghost burns its way up through his veins and bones like so much surging venom. The Wasicun’s spirit scalds a painful path through the nerves of Paha Sapa’s shoulder and then pours out into his chest and throat, roiling and churning like an oily thick smoke. Paha Sapa can taste it. And it tastes like death.

Still expanding, the ghost spreads through Paha Sapa’s torso and down and out, making the boy’s arms and legs feel both weak and heavy at the same time. As the Wasicun’s ghost fills his lungs with a terrible, expanding, thick-filling heaviness that shuts off all breath, Paha Sapa is reminded of the time, he was a child barely able to toddle, when he almost drowned in the Tongue. Yet even through his current terror, this boy just short of eleven summers senses that this—invasion—is something infinitely more terrible than mere death by drowning.

This, Paha Sapa thinks, is what Death feels like when it crawls in through a man’s mouth and eyes and nostrils to steal his spirit. But instead of Paha Sapa’s spirit being dragged out, this stranger’s spirit is being forced in. Death acts here more as terrible intruder than thief.

Paha Sapa cries out as if wounded and crawls away from the staring corpse, tries to stand to run, falls, stands again, falls again, and resumes crawling away from the corpse, kicking and waving his arms and gasping as he rolls downhill across grass, dirt, cacti, horse shit, blood, and more dead wasichus in his blind eagerness to shake the ghost out of his body. But the ghost stays with him and grows larger inside him. Paha Sapa opens his mouth to scream, but this time no sound emerges. The ghost is filling Paha Sapa’s gasping mouth and throat and nostrils as surely as if someone has poured hot liquid buffalo fat down his throat. He cannot breathe. The boy crouches on all fours and shakes like a sick dog but cannot force himself to vomit. Black dots swarm as his field of vision narrows. The ghost cuts into him like a scalping knife, slicing deeper behind his eyes, burrowing into his brain.

Paha Sapa collapses onto his side and rolls up against something soft. When he opens his eyes he realizes that he is only a finger’s length from another dead wasichu’s face: this bluecoat is only a boy, perhaps just five or six summers older than Paha Sapa; the dead Wasicun boy-soldier has lost his hat and his short-cropped hair is red, the first red hair Paha Sapa has ever seen; the dead boy’s skin is paler than that of any Wasicun Paha Sapa has ever heard described and the small nose is dusted with freckles. Paha Sapa vaguely realizes that no breath issues forth from the cave of the soldier’s mouth, opened painfully wide as if in a final scream or as if ready to lunge and bite into Paha Sapa’s gasping, terrified face only a handsbreadth away. He also notices dully that one of the wasichu’s eyes is merely a bloody hole. But Paha Sapa sees that the other eye, open and staring, is precisely the blue of the afternoon sky visible beyond the corpse’s small, pale ear.

Gasping for breath, Paha Sapa stares into that dead eye, its blueness seeming to fade and pale even as he stares, as if seeking some answer there.

—Black Hills?

More warrior ponies thunder by, two of them leaping Paha Sapa and the wasichus’ corpses, but vaguely—distantly—Paha Sapa realizes that one of the ponies has stopped and that a warrior has slid off and is crouched on one knee next to him. He vaguely, distantly, feels a strong hand on his shoulder, rolling him onto his back.

Paha Sapa loses sight of the red-haired boy’s one-eyed corpse and is now looking up at the kneeling warrior.

—Black Hills? Are you shot?

The kneeling warrior is slender and paler of skin than most Lakota and has gone into battle as naked as the heyoka he is, wearing only a breechclout and moccasins, his hair tied simply into two long braids and sporting a single white feather. The lean man’s body paint consists only of hailstones and a lightning streak, reinforcing the first impression that the thin man is indeed a living lightning conductor, a heyoka, one of the receiver-of-visions warrior-protectors who dares to stand between Paha Sapa’s people, the Natural Free Human Beings, and the full fury of the Thunder Beings.

Then, blinking, Paha Sapa notices the pebble behind the man’s ear and the narrow but livid scar stretching back from his left nostril—an old bullet wound, inflicted at point-blank range by a jealous husband, a scar that has left this heyoka warrior’s lips slightly curled up on the left side, suggesting more grimace than smile—and Paha Sapa realizes that this is T’ašunka Witko, Crazy Horse, cousin to Limps-a-Lot’s first wife.

Paha Sapa tries to answer Crazy Horse’s query, but the ghost’s pressure in his chest and throat allows only choking noises to emerge. Just the slightest trickle of air reaches Paha Sapa’s burning lungs. Even as he tries again to speak, he realizes that he must look like a fish gaping and gasping on a riverbank, mouth wide, eyes protruding.

Crazy Horse grunts in contempt or disgust, stands, and leaps onto his pony’s back in a single graceful motion, his rifle still in his hand, then rides away with his followers shouting behind him.

Paha Sapa would weep if he could. Limps-a-Lot was so proud when he introduced his first wife’s famous cousin to his adopted son just four nights earlier in Sitting Bull’s lodge, and now this absolute humiliation…

Still lying on his back, Paha Sapa spreads his arms and legs as wide as he is able. He’s lost his moccasins and now he curls his toes and fingers into the soil in the same way he’s done since he was a small boy when the first touch-the-earth-to-fly visions came. At once the old feelings flow in—that he is clinging to the outer surface of a swiftly spinning ball rather than lying on a flat world, that the sky hangs below him rather than above, that the hurtling sun is just another sky shape wheeling through the sky like the stars or the moon—and with that familiar illusion, Paha Sapa begins to breathe more deeply.

But so does the ghost. Paha Sapa can feel it inhaling and exhaling deep within him. And, he realizes with a shock that makes his spine go cold, the ghost is speaking to him. Or at least speaking to someone from inside him.

Paha Sapa would scream if he could, but still his straining lungs pull in only the thinnest trickle of air. But he can hear the ghost whispering slowly and steadily—the harsh-sounding and unintelligible wasichu words resonating against the inner walls of Paha Sapa’s skull and vibrating against his teeth and bones. Paha Sapa understands not one of the words. He clasps his hands over his ears, but the internal hissing and whispering and muttering continue.

There are other shapes moving among the dead around him now. Paha Sapa hears the trill of Lakota women and with incredible effort he rolls onto his belly and then struggles to his knees. He has disgraced himself and his uncle-father in front of Crazy Horse, but he cannot continue to lie like one of the dead with the women here.

As he struggles to his feet, Paha Sapa sees that he has startled the nearest woman—a Hunkpapa woman he knows named Eagle Robe, the same woman who earlier this day he saw shoot the black-Wasicun scout named Teat whom Sitting Bull called friend—and in her fright, Eagle Robe lifts up the same heavy wasichu cavalry pistol with which she killed the black scout, raises it in both hands, aims it at Paha Sapa’s chest from only ten feet away, and pulls the trigger. The hammer clicks on either an empty chamber or a cartridge that misfires.

Paha Sapa staggers a few steps in her direction, but Eagle Robe and three other women scream and run away, quickly disappearing in the shifting clouds of dust and gunsmoke that continue to roll across the hillside. Paha Sapa looks down and realizes that he is covered almost head to foot with blood—his dead mare’s blood, the ghost-Wasicun’s blood, and more blood from the other corpses, horse and man, that he has rolled across and lain upon.

Paha Sapa knows what he must do. He has to return to the corpse of the Wasicun on whom he counted coup and somehow convince the ghost to go back into the man’s body. Gasping, still unable to wave or call to the half-seen warriors thundering by on their ponies in the dust, Paha Sapa stumbles uphill toward the dead man lying among dead men.

The battle is moving to the south again, and as the dust and gunsmoke begin to drift away on the very slightest of evening breezes coming over the ridgetop above—the high grasses dance and rustle to the wind’s touch—Paha Sapa estimates that there are somewhere around forty dead wasichu horses lying in a rough circle ahead of him. Most appear to have been shot by the bluecoat soldiers themselves. There are about as many wasichu corpses as there are horse carcasses, but the human corpses have been stripped by the Lakota women and now stand out on the hillside like white river boulders against the tan dirt and blood-soiled green grass and darker shades of torn horseflesh.

Paha Sapa steps over a man whose scalped head has been smashed almost flat. Curds of gray have been spattered onto the tall grass that stirs in the evening breeze. Warriors or, more likely, women have cut out the man’s eyes and tongue and slit his throat. His lower belly has been hacked open, and entrails have been tugged out like a buffalo’s after a hunt—slick strands of gray gut wind and coil like glistening dead rattlesnakes in the bloody grass—and Paha Sapa notices that the women have also cut off the man’s ce and balls. Someone has shot arrows into this Wasicun’s opened body, and kidneys, lung, and liver have all been pierced multiple times. The dead man’s heart is missing.

Paha Sapa continues stumbling uphill. The white corpses are everywhere, all sprawled where they fell and many hacked into pieces, most mutilated and lying atop great splashes of blood or atop their own dead horses, but he cannot find the Wasicun whose ghost now breathes and whispers deep in his own guts. He realizes that since he has been only semiconscious at best, it’s possible that more time may have elapsed than he is aware of since he counted coup on the man. Someone, perhaps surviving wasichus, may have hauled the corpse from the battlefield—especially if the man was an officer—in which case Paha Sapa may never be able to get rid of this ghost.

Just when he is sure that the dead man is no longer lying among the scores of other corpses here on this bloody field, he sees the Wasicun’s tall, balding forehead protruding from a pile of white bodies. The stripped corpse is half-sitting against two other naked wasichus. Some woman or warrior has slashed his right thigh open in the customary mark against the Lakota’s dead enemies, but the man has not been scalped. Paha Sapa stares dumbly at the receding hairline and short-cropped light hair and realizes that the scalp was simply not worth the effort of the taking.

But what short stubble of hair there is looks very light, although as much reddish as yellow. Could this possibly be Long Hair? Could it be the ghost of Long Hair that Paha Sapa now carries like some terrible fetus? It seems unlikely. Certainly some Lakota or Cheyenne warriors would have recognized their old enemy Long Hair and treated his corpse with either more outrage or more honor than this all-but-ignored body has received.

Someone, probably a woman, has jammed an arrow far up the corpse’s flaccid-in-death, forever plump, pale ce.

Paha Sapa goes to his knees, feeling expended cartridge shells ripping the skin of his knees, and leans forward, pressing both his palms against the Wasicun’s pale chest, setting his hands near a large, ragged wound where the first rifle bullet struck the man’s left breast. The second and more lethal bullet wound—high on the man’s pale left temple—shows as a simple round hole. The corpse’s eyelids are lowered, eyes almost closed as if in sleep, only the narrowest crescents of white visible under surprisingly full lashes, and this Wasicun’s countenance, unlike so many of the others, looks composed, almost peaceful.

Paha Sapa closes his own eyes as he gasps the words that he hopes are ritual enough.

—Ghost, be gone! Ghost, leave my body!

As Paha Sapa repeats this gasping incantation, he presses down firmly on the naked corpse’s chest, hoping and praying to the Six Grandfathers that the pressure will invite the ghost to flow back down his arm and hand and fingers and into the cold white form.

The wasichu corpse’s mouth opens and the dead man emits a long, satisfied belch.

Paha Sapa jerks his hands back in horror—the ghost seems to be laughing at him from its safe nest inside Paha Sapa’s brain—until he realizes that he’s only pressed some last bubbles of air up and out of the dead Wasicun’s bowels or belly or lungs.

His body shaking, Paha Sapa presses his hands against the cold flesh again, but it is no use. The ghost is not leaving. It has found a home in Paha Sapa’s warm, living, breathing body and has no wish to return to the empty vessel lying there among the equally empty vessels of its murdered friends.

Sobbing now like an infant, ten-summers-old Paha Sapa, a sniveling boy again who thought himself a man just an hour earlier, crawls away from the heap of corpses and falls to the ground and curls up like an unborn thing, all but sucking his thumb as he lies there weeping between the stiffened legs of a dead cavalry horse. The sun is a red orb in the dusty sky as it lowers toward the uplands to the west, its crimson hue turning the sky into a reflection of the bloody earth beneath it.

The ghost continues to whisper and gibber inside his brain as Paha Sapa slides sideways into an exhausted state that is not quite sleep. It is still gibbering and whispering when Limps-a-Lot finds him sometime after sunset and carries him, still unconscious, back to the mourning and celebrating Lakota village in the valley below.