Black Hills

Chapter 12 Bear Butte

PAHA SAPA’S ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY COMES AND GOES, BUT THE boy is too busy fleeing for his life across the plains toward the Black Hills and his hanblečeya to notice the date, which he would not have noticed even if he had stayed in the village.

Limps-a-Lot advised him to ride with his two horses during the night and hide from Crazy Horse and his men during the day if necessary, but that is not necessary. The rain that started pouring down on him the night he left the village at midnight does not and will not let up. For three days and nights it pounds down, accompanied by thunder and lightning that keeps Paha Sapa away from the few trees along the rare streams and causes him to hunker down even while riding, and even in the bright blur of daytime the visibility is only a few hundred feet as the gray curtains of rain roll across the soggy prairie.

Paha Sapa travels by both day and night, but he travels slowly and he travels wet. Never in his short life has Paha Sapa witnessed a Moon of Ripening Berries this wet and stormy. The usual end-of-summer month is so dry that the horse herds never stray from what little water is left in the streambeds, and grasshoppers proliferate until walking through the high, brittle, brown grasses becomes a matter of wading through waves of leaping insects.

Now, after three days and nights with no sleep, almost no food, and a constant diet of fear, Paha Sapa is totally disgusted with himself. Any young brave his age should be able to find shelter and start a fire even in such a rain: Paha Sapa’s flint and steel strike sparks, but he can find nothing dry enough to burn. Nor can he find shelter. The shallow caves and overhangs he knows about are along the streambeds, but now those banks are under three feet or more of water as the streams flood far beyond their banks. Despite his bundles of clothing and gear being carefully wrapped in layers of inside-out hides, everything he owns is soaked through. For a few hours each night, huddled beneath one of his horses, Paha Sapa clutches two blankets around himself, but they only make him wetter and more disspirited.

And then there are the voices.

The dead Wasicun’s voice is more strident than ever, growing louder whenever the poor boy tries to sleep. But in the few days since Paha Sapa touched Crazy Horse and had all the man’s memories flow into him—at times Paha Sapa feels that the violation was like being pissed on and being forced to swallow it—the gabble and gibber of all those memories that are not his have made Paha Sapa ill.

The other-memories are not as clamoringly insistent as the ghost’s night babble, but they are more disturbing.

Paha Sapa is overwhelmed. He has only eleven rather uneventful years of his own to remember, while Crazy Horse thought himself to be thirty-four years old this summer when he poured all his memories into Paha Sapa’s aching brain, and—somehow, despite his will not to—Paha Sapa’s vision saw forward another year or two to Crazy Horse’s death by bayonet.

Paha Sapa remembers nothing of his own parents, of course, since his mother died at his birth and his father months before then, but now he can remember the boy Curly Hair’s, or Curly’s, parents, his Brulé mother and holy-man father named Crazy Horse. He remembers clearly, too clearly, the time in Curly’s sixteenth summer when, after Curly performed bravely in a raid against the Arapaho (and was wounded in the leg by an arrow, but only after killing several Arapaho, but it’s Paha Sapa who now remembers the pain of that arrow), Curly’s father, Crazy Horse, gave his son his own name and forever after went by the name Worm.

Paha Sapa’s memories of his own recent childhood are now invaded by the false memories of Curly–Crazy Horse’s years with his Oglala Lakota band, but Curly–Crazy Horse’s memories are tinged red with memory-emotions of violence, near insanity, and a constant strangeness. Paha Sapa is the adopted son of Limps-a-Lot and hopes to be a holy man like his respected tunkašila, but Curly–Crazy Horse, the son of another holy man, wanted—has always wanted—to be heyoka, a dreamer and servant for the Thunder Beings.

Paha Sapa, cold, frightened, hungry, feverish, and infinitely lonely this rainy midnight, is setting off alone for his hopeful hanblečeya—alone—in the Black Hills, while in his intruding memories he sees Curly Hair’s four-day ceremony, during which that boy-man’s Vision was given to him. He sees Curly Hair being taught and helped and supported and his inipi interpreted by his pipe-bearing elders and relatives and holy men. Paha Sapa fears, deeply, that he will never receive a vision from Wakan Tanka or the Six Grandfathers beyond these invading, obscene visions of other people’s ghosts and minds and futures, but now he has to suffer memories of Curly–Crazy Horse’s successful hanblečeya and that strange man’s celebration and acceptance as a Thunder Dreamer.

No men have chanted or will chant Tunka-shila, hi-yay, hi-yay! for Paha Sapa, as he remembers in these alien memories the band’s men chanting for young Crazy Horse.

Paha Sapa has never touched a winčinčala’s, a pretty young girl’s, winyaˇn shan, yet in these new memories now echoing in the boy’s feverish brain, he clearly remembers having sex with No Water’s wife, Black Buffalo Woman, and half a dozen other women. It is… confusing.

Paha Sapa has never suffered an injury worse than the bruises and bloody noses of boyhood, but now he remembers not only Curly–Crazy Horse’s war wounds, but also the sensation of being shot in the face at point-blank range by the outraged husband No Water. He tries to avoid the other-memory, but the sensations of the pistol ball sliding along his teeth, opening his cheek, and smashing his jaw are too strong to shut out.

Most disturbingly this endless black, rainy night, Paha Sapa’s feverish mind tries to deal with the fact that he—Black Hills—has never hurt another person beyond rough childhood play, while the memories of Crazy Horse bring him the joyous-sick recollections of shooting, stabbing, lancing, killing, and scalping many—Crow, Arapaho, another Lakota, and wasichus almost too many to count.

Paha Sapa is afraid that he is dying.

His head aches so fiercely that he pauses every quarter hour or so to vomit, even though his belly has been empty for hours. The constant, solid rain makes him so dizzy that he has trouble staying on Limps-a-Lot’s roan, Worm, and the mare, Pehánska, is acting more like a white snake, rearing and pulling the line and trying to escape, than like a white crane this terrible midnight.

Paha Sapa’s head is full of pain, mucus, and memories that he does not want, cannot stand, and knows he shall never free himself from.

And to make the night more hopeless, he is sure now that he is lost. He thinks he should have reached the Black Hills after three days and nights riding, but in his stupid child-inexperience navigating in the rain with no real landmarks (or those few he knew flooded), he is sure that he has somehow missed all of the Black Hills, the Heart of the World.

It’s at this midnight hour and one of the low points of his life that Paha Sapa sees a light far off to his left.

His mind, that small amount that is still his and not hostage to an angry warrior’s memories, tells him to turn the horses’ heads to the right and get away from the light. If it’s a campfire, it belongs to wasichu who would kill him on sight or to Crazy Horse, who will torture and then kill him.

But he turns to the left, to the east, he hopes, and rides on in the night toward the tiny glow, waiting for the light to flicker out or disappear. Instead, between squalls that obliterate it from sight, it grows stronger.

After half an hour of riding through rain toward the light, his horse slipping and staggering in the deepening mud, Paha Sapa sees a large, dark shape above and around the small circle of light. It has to be Matho Paha, Bear Butte, which means that he is only a few miles north-northeast of the mass of the Black Hills.

But Matho Paha is a favorite camping place for Lakota bands heading toward the Hills, which is precisely what Crazy Horse was ready to do.

Riding up to this campfire may well mean Paha Sapa’s death.

Teetering on his horse, keeping from falling off only by lacing his fingers through Worm’s mane, Paha Sapa continues riding toward the light.

THE LIGHT IS COMING FROM A CAVE a few hundred feet up the northwest slope of the towering Bear Butte.

Knowing that he should back into the pouring darkness, Paha Sapa continues to lead his two horses up to the opening and through the waterfall of runoff pouring over the wide cave entrance. The cavern quickly turns out of sight, but there is a broad area just within the entrance where dry grass still grows. Paha Sapa ties the roan and the mare there, pulls Limps-a-Lot’s feathered war lance from beneath wet straps on Pehánska’s back, and proceeds, slowly, carefully, deeper into the firelight-brightened cave.

Immediately, Paha Sapa’s stomach cramps and his mouth fills with saliva.

Whoever is back there, they are cooking something. It smells like rabbit to Paha Sapa. He loves just-cooked rabbit.

Paha Sapa stops and listens several times as the low-ceilinged cavern twists slightly, but the only sounds are a soft humming, the crackle of the fire, and, behind him, the constant munching and occasional shaking of mane and tail of his two horses. Have the people by the fire heard his approach?

Paha Sapa comes around the last turn, lance in both hands, and there by a roaring fire, in a broad section of the cave, an old man sits cross-legged, humming softly to himself and gingerly turning two spits over the fire, each holding a skinned and quickly browning rabbit.

Paha Sapa lowers the lance a bit and walks into the circle of firelight. The old man, his long gray hair tied in careful pigtails, wears a loose blue-print shirt that might have been made by wasichus, and his long pants are of some graying blue material that Paha Sapa first thinks is the wasichu-soldiers’ sort of canvas trouser, but realizes is a different, more woven material. The old man’s moccasins have traditional (and beautiful) Cheyenne-style beadwork. (Another pair of moccasins, of a sort Paha Sapa has never seen—they almost look to be made of green wasichu canvas—lies steaming and drying near the fire.) The old man’s eyes, squinting up and across the fire at Paha Sapa now, seem absolutely black except for the reflection of the flames there. But there is no anger or fear in the old man’s neutral but somehow pleasant expression.

When he speaks, it is in fluent Lakota with a strong Cheyenne accent.

—Welcome, boy. I did not hear you arrive. My hearing is not what it used to be.

Paha Sapa lowers the lance a little more but does not set it down.

—Greetings to you, uncle. You are of the Shahiyela?

—Yes, I am Cheyenne. But I have spent much time with the Lakota. I have never been the enemy of your people and have taught many.

Paha Sapa nods and does set the lance down, against the wall of the cave. He still has his knife, there are no signs of other men having been here—the sleeping hides and cooking utensils are all for one—and he doubts if the old man could rise quickly from his cross-legged posture. Paha Sapa, whose stomach is now actively rumbling at the sight and smell of the two browning rabbits on the spits, remembers his manners.

—I am called Paha Sapa.

The old man smiles, showing long, yellowed but strong teeth, with only one missing on the bottom. It is a lot of teeth, Paha Sapa thinks, for a man who looks so old.

—Welcome, Paha Sapa. Odd for the Lakota to name a boy-child after a place. We shall have to talk about that. My name is Robert Sweet Medicine.

Paha Sapa blinks at the sound of the man’s name. He has never heard “Robert” before, even with Cheyenne names. It sounds wasichu.

The old man gestures to a hide unrolled across the fire from him.

—Sit down. Sit down. Are you hungry?

—I’m very hungry, uncle.

The sudden smile again.

—That is why I cooked two rabbits tonight.

Paha Sapa has to squint at this.

—You said you did not hear me approaching.

—I did not, young Black Hills. I simply knew there would be another with me here tonight. There, it should be ready—there’s a wooden bowl over there beneath that clutter. Just use your knife to cut what you want. The whole rabbit is yours. There’s water in that jug there…. The smaller jug holds mni waken, and you are welcome to it as well, as long as you do not drink it all.

Holy water. The wasichus’ whiskey. Paha Sapa has never tasted it and, despite his curiosity, knows he should not taste it now.

—Thank you, uncle.

He chews some steaming-hot rabbit, his face and hands instantly becoming greasy, and drinks some of the cold water. After a while, he wipes his mouth and speaks.

—I have been to Bear Butte many times, uncle, but I did not know there were caves here.

—Of course you did. It was in a cave here that Maiyun gave my ancestor Mustoyef the Gift of the Four Arrows. It was in a cave here, before time was counted as it is today, that the Kiowa received from their gods the sacred kidney of a bear and the Apache the gift of sacred horse medicine. You Lakota—and I know you have heard this, Paha Sapa—say that it was in a cave here that your ancestors received the gift of the sacred pipe from Wakan Tanka.

—Yes, I have heard all of this, uncle—except about the Kiowa and the bear kidney—but I have never seen this cave or any other, although we boys have climbed and played all over and around Matho Paha.

The old man smiles again. Each time he does that, a thousand deep wrinkles deepen around his eyes and mouth.

—Well, then, Bear Butte still has secrets from us, does it not, Black Hills?

Paha Sapa speaks through another mouthful of rabbit. It is excellent.

—Did my people receive the gift of the sacred pipe, and your people the Gift of the Four Arrows, here? In this cave?

Robert Sweet Medicine shrugs.

—Who’s to know? Or who knows if any of that actually happened? Once a place is considered sacred by any tribe, the other tribes hurry to find—or make up—some story of its sacredness to them as well.

This shocks Paha Sapa. He assumed, when Robert Sweet Medicine said that he’d taught Lakota as well as Cheyenne, that the old man was a wičasa wakan like Limps-a-Lot and Long Turd and the others. Paha Sapa has never heard a real holy man admit that the old stories of the gods and grandfathers might be made up. Just the thought of that makes the boy dizzier. The gabble of his ghost and the awful memories of Crazy Horse buzz louder in his aching head.

—Are you all right, Paha Sapa? You look ill.

For a second, Paha Sapa has the wild urge to tell the old man the truth about everything—about his ability to touch people and to see into them and their pasts and futures sometimes (he has no urge at all to touch Robert Sweet Medicine), about the ghost of Long Hair (if it is Long Hair) talking and talking and talking in that ugly and endless babble of wasichu sounds, about Crazy Horse wanting to kill him, about his own fear (almost a certainty) that he will fail in the coming hanblečeya—tell the old man everything.

—No, uncle. I have a little fever is all.

—Take off your clothes, boy. All of them.

Paha Sapa’s hand creeps to the hilt of his knife in its scabbard on his belt. He knows that some of these wičasa wakan, especially the recluses, are winkte.

Some winkte dress and act like women throughout their lives; some are rumored to have the organs of both men and women; but most winkte, according to what the older boys told Paha Sapa, prefer putting their stiff child makers up young boys’ behinds rather than in lovely winčinčalas’ winyaˇn shans where they belong.

Paha Sapa does not want to know what that feels like. He decides that he will have to kill Robert Sweet Medicine if the old winkte comes any closer.

The old wičasa wakan sees Paha Sapa’s expression and looks at the shaking hand on the knife hilt and then Robert Sweet Medicine laughs. It is a deep, rich, long laugh, and it echoes slightly in and around the bend of the cavern beyond where they sit by the fire.

—Don’t be stupid, boy. I’m not after your unze. I have been married—to women—eight times. That’s eight different women, little Black Hills, not eight wives at once. So unless you brought one with you, there are no winkte in this cave tonight. You’re feverish and flushed. And shaking hard. All your layers are soaked through, and I think you’ve been soaked like that for days and nights. Get dry and stay near the fire.

Paha Sapa squints at the old man, but he lets his hand fall away from his knife.

—Pull those two blankets up, boy. Get out of your clothes—behind the blankets if you wish—and set your wet things on this empty spit to dry. Moccasins as well. Keep your knife if it makes you feel safer. The blankets are clean and free of vermin.

Paha Sapa blushes but does what the old man suggests, realizing as he does so that he’s shaking so hard he can barely put his clothes on the drying rack. He clutches the blankets around him. They are scratchy against his wet skin but infinitely warmer than the soaked clothing he’s just surrendered. He has kept the knife.

Robert Sweet Medicine wipes his mouth and sets the spit holding his browned rabbit, barely touched, on Paha Sapa’s Y sticks. The boy is down to the bones of his rabbit. Few things, Paha Sapa has always thought, look as reduced and vulnerable as a rabbit without its skin and head.

—Here, boy. I’ve eaten all I want. Help yourself to this.

Paha Sapa grunts his thanks and begins cutting pieces off and into his bowl.

Robert Sweet Medicine looks to his right across the flames, toward the cave entrance.

—How long has it been raining? Two days and nights?

—Three days and nights, uncle. No… wait… four nights now, and three full days. Everything is flooded.

The old man nods.

—On the day before the rain began, I met a Wasicun on the trail to the top of the butte. It was a sunny day. Some clouds later, but mostly sunny.

Paha Sapa speaks through a full mouth.

—Did you kill him, uncle?

—Kill who?

—The Wasicun!

The old man chuckles.

—No, I talked to him.

—Was he a bluecoat? A soldier?

—No, no. I think he had been a warrior once—I am sure of it—but no longer. He told me… no, that is not right; he did not quite tell me… but he let me know that he had once walked on the moon.

Paha Sapa blinks at this.

—So he was witko—crazy.

Robert Sweet Medicine shows that long-toothed smile again.

—He did not seem witko. He seemed… lonely. But, little Black Hills, have you never known a wičasa wakan, or some other sort of human with powers—a waayatan prophet, for instance, or a wakinyan dreamer who sees visions sent by the Thunder Beings, or a wapiya conjurer, or a wanaazin who shoots at disease, or a dangerous wokabiyeya who works with witch medicine, or a wihmunge who sucks disease straight out of a dying person with his own breath—who has spoken of leaving his body and traveling to far places?

Paha Sapa laughs and takes a long drink of the cold springwater in the jug.

—Yes, uncle, of course I have. But I have never heard any holy man given powers who speaks of…

He pauses, remembering his own lying-in-the-grass experience (dream?) of rising so high in the sky that the sky grew dark in the daytime and the stars came out.

—… of… traveling so far. But are you saying, uncle, that wasichus can have Visions, just like real People?

Robert Sweet Medicine shrugs and tosses more twigs onto the fire. Paha Sapa is growing warm and sleepy beneath his blankets. The second rabbit is now bones.

The old man’s voice, strongly resonant in the little cave, seems strangely familiar to Paha Sapa.

—Have you ever noticed, little Black Hills, how all of our tribes—all the ones I’ve ever heard of, even those east of the Big River and west of the Shining Mountains and beyond the Never No Summer range, even those so far south that the plains are desert and no grass grows there—that all of us give our tribes names meaning the same as Tsêhéstáno, the People, as we Cheyenne say; or the Natural Free Human Beings, as you Lakota call yourselves; or the True Human Beings, as the Crow say—and so on and so on and so on.

Paha Sapa has forgotten the question, if there was a question, and is completely missing the point (if there was a point). He replies only by nodding sleepily and, remembering his manners, by belching softly.

—I am just asking, little Black Hills, why each of our tribes calls itself “the Human Beings” and refers to no other tribe or group, even the wasichus, in that way.

Paha Sapa rubs his eyes.

—I suppose, uncle, because our tribe is—I mean, that we are—the real human beings, while others aren’t?

The answer seems a little inadequate even to the quickly warming and belly-filled boy, but he can think of no other at the moment. But he will revisit the question more than a few times over the next decades.

Robert Sweet Medicine is nodding as if satisfied by a particularly clever answer from one of his wičasa wakan students.

—Perhaps, little Black Hills, when you learn the particular language of the Wasicun ghost now babbling in your brain, you will begin to understand this strange question of naming ourselves a little better.

Paha Sapa nods sleepily and then snaps awake—he has not told this old man about the ghost of Long Hair in him.

Has he?

But Robert Sweet Medicine is speaking again.

—You’re going to the real Paha Sapa to perform your lonely hanblečeya, so you should fast after tonight’s feast. The place you seek is only a day’s ride from here if you take the proper paths in the Hills. I trust that your tunkašila, Limps-a-Lot, has instructed you well as to the preparations and sent along with you everything you need to do yuwipi properly?

—Oh, yes, uncle! I have learned what I must have, and for things that I cannot find in the forest, they are all packed away on my white mare you hear cropping at the cave entrance!

Robert Sweet Medicine nods but does not smile.

—Washtay! Limps-a-Lot sent with you the properly sacred pipe and the strong caNliyukpanpi fine-smoking tobacco?

—Oh, yes, uncle!

Did he? In four nights of rain now, Paha Sapa has not fully unpacked the bundles his grandfather sent with him, usually merely hunkering against the mare in the dark downpour and groping around for the dried meat or biscuits that Three Buffalo Woman packed away for him. Is the sacred, irreplaceable Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa—the Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that Sitting Bull had appointed Limps-a-Lot guardian of—really in his bundle of goods, or has Limps-a-Lot sent along the lesser but still sacred tribal pipestone pipe? Come to think of it, Paha Sapa has not seen in his various soaked bundles the red eagle feathers that adorn the priceless Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

The old man is still talking.

—Washtay, Paha Sapa. Stay away from the wasichus’ roads—for the soldiers and miners will kill you on sight. Go to the top of the Grandfathers’ Hill. Yuhaxcan cannonpa! Carry your pipe. Your pipe is wakan. Taku woecon kin ihyuha el woilagyape lo. Ehantan najin oyate maka stimnyyan cannonpa kin he uywakanpelo. It is used for doing all things. Ever since the standing people have been over all the earth, the pipe has been wakan.

Paha Sapa shakes his head in an attempt to rid himself of the buzzing and confusion there. His fever fills him. His eyes are watering, either from the smoke or from strong emotions he does not understand. Still sitting cross-legged on the blanket while wrapped in two more blankets, he seems to be naked and floating inches above the cavern floor. Robert Sweet Medicine’s voice booms in his head like wasichu cannon fire.

—Little Black Hills, you know how properly to construct your oinikaga tipi?

—Yes, Grandfather… I mean uncle. I have helped Limps-a-Lot and the men construct many sweat lodges.

—Ohan. Wašte! And you know how to select the proper sintkala waksu from those other stones that might blind or kill you?

—Oh, yes, uncle.

But does he? When the time comes in the Black Hills, will he be able to differentiate the special stones in the creek beds, those with the “beadwork” designs that show them safe for use in the sweat lodge?

Paha Sapa begins sweating and shaking under his blankets.

—Has your grandfather’s wife cut the forty squares of flesh from her arm for your wagmugha to go with the yuwipi stones?

—Oh, yes, uncle!

Have Raven’s Hair or Three Buffalo Woman cut the necessary bits of flesh for the sacred rattle or gathered the little fossil stones to be found only in certain anthills? How could they have? They have not had time!

The old man nods again and throws several scented sticks onto the already raging fire. The cave fills with the sour-sweet smell of incense.

—You have been warned, little Black Hills, that once you are nagi, pure spirit essence, you will be visited—almost certainly attacked—by ocin xica, bad-tempered animals, as well as by wanagi and ciciye and siyoko.

—I am not afraid of ghosts, uncle, and ciciye and siyoko are boogeymen for children.

But Paha Sapa’s voice is shaking as he says this.

Robert Sweet Medicine seems not to notice. He is staring at the fire, and his black eyes are filled with dancing flames.

—A hanblečeya Vision is a terribly serious thing to put on the shoulders of any man, my son, but especially upon the shoulders of one so young. You understand that sometimes the fate of the vision-seeker’s band depends upon the Vision. Sometimes the fate of an entire people—more than a tribe, but a race—depends upon the Vision and what is done after that Vision. You understand this?

—Yes, of course, uncle.

Paha Sapa decides that Robert Sweet Medicine is insane. Winkto.

—Do you know why the Grandfathers, the gods, and Wakan Tanka himself exist, little Black Hills?

Paha Sapa wants to say—What are you going on about, old man?—but he manages a respectful—

—Yes, uncle.

Robert Sweet Medicine looks up from the fire and stares directly at Paha Sapa, but the old man’s black eyes still reflect the flames.

—No, you do not, young Paha Sapa. But you will. The gods and the Grandfathers and the All himself exist because the so-called People exist to worship them. The People exist because the buffalo exist and because the grass grows free throughout the world we think is the World. But when the buffalo are gone and when the grass is gone, the People will be gone as well. And then the gods, the spirits—of our ancestors, of the place, of life itself—will be gone as well. Do you see, Paha Sapa?

Paha Sapa can humor the old man no longer.

—No, uncle.

Robert Sweet Medicine grins his strong-toothed grin.

—Washtay! That is good. But you will be the first to see, little Black Hills. Gods die as buffalo die, as people die. Sometimes slowly and in great agony. Sometimes quickly, unprepared, and not believing in their own death, denying the arrow or the wound or the disease even as it is killing them. Do you understand this, Paha Sapa?

—No, uncle.

—Washtay! This is as it should be now. What matters is not that you see how the buffalo and the people and the way the people live and the gods and the grandfathers and the All shall die and disappear, Paha Sapa—many of us with the gift of wakan have glimpsed this before—but what you do about it in the eighty summers and more remaining to you. What you—no one else—what you do about it. Do you understand this, Paha Sapa?

The boy is angry now. Sleepy and feverish and ill and close to weeping and very angry. If he kills this old man now, no one would ever know it.

—No, uncle.

—Washtay! You will sleep late and long in the morning, young Black Hills, and I will be gone…. The rain will abate just before sunrise, and I have business in the O-ana-gazhee, the Sheltering Place, far from here and the Hills. I will leave no food for you, and you must not touch yours. Your fasting must begin at sunrise.

—Yes, uncle.

—Your testing will not be over if and when you survive your terrible hanblečeya. That is just the beginning. You will never get word of your Vision back to Limps-a-Lot and your band. Your horses will be killed—not by Crazy Horse, who seeks you elsewhere and then forgets you in his lust to kill more wasichus—and your sacred pipe will be stolen and you will be stripped naked, but this is as it should be. Understand that while there is no Plan for the universe, there are specific crucifixions and new births for each of us.

Paha Sapa does not understand that word—crucifixion—but the old man is making no sense with the words the boy does understand, so he lets it go.

—I will not let that happen, uncle. I will die—as my father died, staked down and fighting—rather than surrender our tribe’s sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa that Limps-a-Lot and ten generations of holy men before him have kept safe, never losing so much as a single red feather on it.

Robert Sweet Medicine looks at him.

—Good. Let me tell you now, Paha Sapa, that I am honored that you will name your son and only child after me.

Paha Sapa can only stare at the old man.

—It is time to lower the fire to embers, go to the cave entrance to piss and to see that your two horses are comfortable, and then to sleep, Paha Sapa. I will wake from time to time while you sleep to shake my own wagmuha to keep the ghosts at bay tonight.

Robert Sweet Medicine shows him the ceremonial rattle that looks to be as old as time.

—Paha Sapa, toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo.

I shall see you again with the eye of my heart.

With many groans and grunts, the old man slowly uncrosses his legs and manages—after several tries—to get to his feet, where he sways as old men do when seeking their balance. Robert Sweet Medicine’s voice is very soft.

—Mitakuye oyasin!

All my relatives. It is done.

Together, slowly, the old man moving very slowly but the boy not helping him because he is afraid to touch him, Paha Sapa and Robert Sweet Medicine walk to the entrance of the cave where they check on the horses and piss—far apart, each looking into a different part of the darkness—out into the rainy night.