Black Hills

Chapter 14 In the Paha Sapa

HE KEEPS TRYING TO RISE INTO THE AIR BUT FAILS EACH TIME.

What once came so easily to Paha Sapa, like effortless play, now seems impossible, as if his soul has grown inescapably heavy. It is the ninth day of his hanblečeya, the ninth day of his total fast, and his weakness is matched only by his weariness and sense of defeat. He has come to believe that this quest for a vision was premature, presumptuous, and doomed to failure. Many braves much older and wiser than he have failed before this—no male of the Natural Free Human Beings is ever assured a Vision and those few who receive them often do so only after years of frustration and many repeated hanblečeyas.

Except first for the hunger, which has departed, and then the weakness of his long fast, this oymni—his wandering time—has been mostly pleasant. When Paha Sapa awakened in Robert Sweet Medicine’s cave at Bear Butte, there was no sign of the old man—not his drinking or eating bowls, not even a trace of the rabbits they’d eaten—and Paha Sapa could almost have believed that the old Cheyenne wičasa wakan had been a dream. But Worm and White Crane were rested and well fed when he found them still hobbled in the entrance to the cave that morning, and though the sun had not come out, the days of downpour outside had changed to an increasingly heavy drizzle.

It was then, for a scrotum-tightening panicked moment, that Paha Sapa untied the bundle on Three Buffalo Woman’s white mare, seeking wildly for the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, the sacred and irreplaceable Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that he, Paha Sapa, had foolishly told the old Cheyenne he was carrying to his inipi first real sweat lodge ceremony.

It was there, separated into its different segments, each segment wrapped in a red cloth, the red feathers intact.

Paha Sapa’s knees went weak then, as he realized how easy it would have been for the old Cheyenne—if he had been more than a dream—to steal Paha Sapa’s tribe’s most sacred object. And then his knees stayed weak as the full weight of Limps-a-Lot’s trust sank in. Paha Sapa was heading to the Black Hills, reportedly rotten with wasichus, soldiers and miners both, who would kill him and rob him on a whim, even while enemy tribes swarmed—as they always did—around those Hills, always on the lookout for a lone Lakota boy to kill and rob or enslave.

Paha Sapa wished to the depths of his heart that morning that Limps-a-Lot had sent with him only an ordinary stone pipe for his inipi and hanblečeya ceremonies, even if the chances for a true Vision were lessened by not having the more wakan and powerful Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa with its special tobacco.

But the day’s ride through occasional heavy rain into the Paha Sapa themselves was uneventful, Paha Sapa riding the gelding and leading the mare in a wide arc to the west to avoid the roads and heavily traveled paths the wasichus used to get to their mining town of Deadwood.

In later years, especially when taking his son on their own small oymni wandering time to the Black Hills and what was left of the open Great Plains, Paha Sapa will find it very difficult to explain what the world was like during these days of his people’s proud years, when the Lakota gods still listened to their worshippers and when the earth was alive for them.

These days, entering the Black Hills and riding down streambeds and across long meadows between the trees, always being careful to avoid ambush, Paha Sapa and everything he perceives seem to exist and interact simultaneously around him and within him, and interact on at least two levels: the joyous physical level on which he feels the horse between his legs and the rain on his face and smells the wet aspen leaves and hears the breathing of the gelding and mare as well as the chatter of squirrels and cry of crows, and the overlapping, more stirring and soul-touching nagi level of himself and everything else existing and touching each other as pure spirit-essence.

He feels the waniya waken—the very air as alive. Spirit breath. Renewal. Tunkan. Inyan. The rocks and boulders are alive. And holy. The storms that move above the prairie behind him and mass against the hills rising before him are Wakinyan, the noise of the Thunder Spirit and language of the Thunder Beings. The late-summer flowers blooming in the high, wet grass of the meadows show the touch and color preferences of Tatuskansa, the moving spirit, the quickening power of the All. In the rivers Paha Sapa fords dwell the Unktehi, monsters and spirits both. Sleeping under his canvas shelter and warming robes, Paha Sapa hears the howl of coyotes and thinks of Coyote, who will trick him during his hanblečeya if he can. The glistening spiderweb on a tree bears unreadable messages from Iktomé, the spider man, who is a worse trickster even than Coyote. In the evening, when all of the other spirits are quiet and the sky is emptying of light, Paha Sapa is able to hear the breathing of Grandfather Mystery and—sometimes—of Wakan Tanka himself. And at night, during the rare times the clouds part, Paha Sapa watches the stars spread from dark horizon to dark horizon, his viewing undimmed by any light (he has no campfire), and in these minutes young Paha Sapa can trace the path of his life, past and future, knowing that when he dies his own spirit will travel south along the Milky Way with the spirits of all those Natural Free Human Beings who have gone before him.

This is truly the maka sitomni, the world over, the universe, and the world is never empty. More than forty-five years later, when poet and historian Doane Robinson teaches him the English word numinous, Paha Sapa will think back to these days and smile sadly.

PAHA SAPA HAS NO TROUBLE finding the mountain called the Six Grandfathers; its nearby peak, Evil Spirit Hill (which Paha Sapa will live to see renamed Harney Peak after a famous Indian-killer Wasicun) is the tallest in the Hills at a little more than seven thousand feet.

The south side of the Six Grandfathers is all crags and open, weathered, rocky face—good for nothing, not even climbing—but the north side has more gradual approaches up through the trees. There is a stream at the bottom there, where Paha Sapa makes his lower camp and builds his sweat lodge. The place he chooses is a sheltered bowl with the stream running through and where there is ample good grass for the horses. He retrieves the priceless Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa from the large bundle on White Crane’s back, the pipe’s segments still wrapped in red cloth, as well as the wasmuha rattle that holds the forty small squares of Three Buffalo Woman’s skin along with yuwipi stones.

It takes Paha Sapa a full day to find the sintkala waksu sacred stones for the sweat lodge, all that time spent wading through the ice-cold streams for miles around, seeking out the special rocks with the beadwork design. It makes Paha Sapa shiver to know that these very stones were once touched by Tuncan, the ancient and hard stone spirit who was present at the creation of all things. Then he has to find exactly the right sort of willows. It takes him another full day from dawn to late-summer sunset to build his sintkala waksu sweat lodge for his inipi.

After cutting down the required twelve white willow trees (and rejecting many more), Paha Sapa sticks the poles in a circle about six feet across. He weaves the pliable branches into a dome and covers that dome with skins and robes he’s brought with him. Then he adds leaves to close all gaps. Inside, Paha Sapa digs a hole in the center of the little lodge and saves the dirt to make a tidy little path that the spirits can follow into his sweat lodge. At the end of the little path, he builds up a low mound called an unci, the same word his people use for “grandmother” because that is the way that Limps-a-Lot and Sitting Bull and the other holy men have taught him to think of the whole earth: Grandmother.

The opening to Paha Sapa’s onikare—another word he uses for sweat lodge—faces west, since only heyoka may enter such a lodge from the east. In the center of his lodge he sets forked sticks firmly into the earth as a framework to support the sacred pipe, Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa. Not having a buffalo skull for the entrance, Paha Sapa spends a day hunting in the pine forest, kills a large deer, leaves the carcass for the birds and other scavengers—he is deep enough into his fast that his belly is rumbling all the time now and he often has to sit and lower his head until his vision clears—and he flenses and cleans the skull, resisting the urge to nibble on the eyes, and mounts it near the entrance with six pouches holding offerings of the finest tobacco sent by Limps-a-Lot. This is for good luck.

Now Paha Sapa really misses the presence of his grandfather Limps-a-Lot and the other important men of the village. Were he doing this hanblečeya properly, the older men would have cut and woven the willows and prepared his sintkala waksu for him, and Paha Sapa would not have started his four days of fasting in the sweat lodge until everything had been made ready for him. But because of Robert Sweet Medicine’s advice at Bear Butte, Paha Sapa has been fasting—from solid food at least—for almost six days by the time his sweat lodge is ready and his sacred pipe is filled and his gourds and pouches of water are ready to be poured upon the white-hot rocks in the center of the pitch-black and already sweltering lodge. At this point he is fasting from all food but may still drink water. During the actual vision quest in his pit, he knows, he must go at least four days without food or water.

And it is Paha Sapa himself who must chant the prayers here alone, as best he can, and gasp out “Ho, Grandfather!” each time he pours more water on the glowing sinktala waksu stones and feels the sacred energy flowing out of them with the explosions of steam. No man can take the blind, steaming interior of a sweat lodge indefinitely, and every hour or so Paha Sapa stumbles naked into the infinitely cooler August air outside, where he collapses gasping in the high grasses, sometimes startling his grazing horses, but always, after a few gasping minutes—during which he crawls to drink deeply from the teeth-numbingly cold stream, almost weeping with gratitude that he is still allowed to drink at this point—he stumbles back into the sweat lodge to smoke and to chant some more. He takes longer breaks only to bring more sticks for the fire and more water to pour on the rocks. Always a thin boy, Paha Sapa has lost any body fat that may have remained on his lean frame and bones.

For three long days he purifies himself thus, and although he welcomes a vision then, none comes. He knows that the sweat lodge is mere preamble, but he had hoped…

On the fourth day of his purifying, the ninth day of his fast, weak from hunger and shaking from the effects of the heat and steam and darkness and tobacco, wearing only moccasins and a single robe, he takes the sacred pipe and a bundle and makes the forty-five-minute hard climb above his sweat lodge to a spot near the rocky summit of the Six Grandfathers. There Paha Sapa finds a soft place between the rocky ridge and boulders. He clears this spot of pine needles and pinecones and digs a shallow pit just long enough to lie in. A red blanket, one of Limps-a-Lot’s prized possessions, was in the bundle on White Crane, and now Paha Sapa uses his knife to cut the blanket into strips that he mounts on poles to serve as banners around his Vision Pit. Strings tied between these poles hold bundles of bright cloth holding still more tobacco—Paha Sapa wonders if Limps-a-Lot kept any for himself to smoke—and he cuts some small squares from his thighs and forearms to add to these sacred bundles around his Vision Pit.

The fifth pole rises from the center of the vision pit, next to his right arm as he lies on his back, and that final pole announces that—at least for the purpose of this Vision—this place is the center of the world and the locus of all spiritual power.

Paha Sapa has removed everything before entering the Vision Pit, even his breechclout and moccasins, since one has to wait for a vision in the same naked state one entered the world, but he does not lie in the pit all day. In the morning, when the sun rises in the east out beyond the faraway but clearly visible Maka Sica, the Badlands, Paha Sapa stands atop the rocky summit of the Six Grandfathers and holds the stem of his sacred pipe out to this most powerful visible form of Wakan Tanka while chanting greeting prayers and vision supplications to the spirit-behind-the-sun. All day he rises from the Vision Pit to repeat the gestures and chants and prayers, turning, at noon, to the south, standing at each pole he has marked with his banners, and singing the chants and supplications to the west all through the evening.

Paha Sapa watches everything carefully—the skies, the weather, the wind, the movement of the trees, the soaring of a hawk or owl, the distant padding of a coyote or raccoon—with the heightened awareness and expectation that the spirit of that thing or creature may be part of his Vision.

Everything is as it should be.

NOTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE.

A decent hanblečeya is usually carried out under clear skies in the daytime and under starry skies at night, but it continues pouring rain for almost the entire time that Paha Sapa is in the Black Hills. When he wakes to greet the rising sun in the morning with his chants and prayers—only imperfectly remembered, and there are no wičasa wakan or elders here to help him chant or help him recall the words—the “rising sun” is a murky glow half-glimpsed to the east through thick drizzle. With the thick clouds above each day, he finds it almost impossible to tell when the sun has passed the zenith for his ritual facing-south and prayers, and the sunsets are no more visible than the sunrises. Paha Sapa continues holding the stem of the dripping Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa out to rain and grayness. Despite his efforts, the ancient and sacred red feathers on the pipe are soggy and molting from the damp.

Without the help from the older holy men and others, everything is wrong. Paha Sapa knows that his sweat lodge is not the elegant and proper structure it would have been if Limps-a-Lot or even Angry Badger had helped shape it. He feels that his selection of the sacred rocks was imperfect and, indeed, several cracked when he threw water on the glowing stones. He knows that his prayers and entreaties are sloppy and suspects that even aspects of his vision pit were wrongly done. Most important, the absence of other men and their chants and prayers in the pipe-smoking and other sweat lodge ceremonies makes Paha Sapa feel sure that the purification is incomplete and his inipi must be unpleasing to any spirits.

Finally, there is the fact that Paha Sapa is starving to death. Young men always begin their total fast after the last of the sweat lodge purification is finished, but Paha Sapa began his fasting—following the advice of a Cheyenne holy man at Bear Butte in what may have been only a stupid dream—even before reaching the Black Hills. Rather than start his total fasting on the first day when he dug the vision pit, that was Paha Sapa’s ninth day without food and his body is now as shaky and unreliable as his mind.

But there are more compelling reasons than that to convince Paha Sapa that this entire vision quest is already a failure.

He realizes now, as he lies in his muddy pit atop the rocky ridge-summit of the Six Grandfathers with rain pouring onto his face, that Crazy Horse was right: no man infected with the ghost of Long Hair, or any other Wasicun, can be pleasing to the gods and spirits, much less to Wakan Tanka. And as Paha Sapa’s body grows weaker and his mind more muddled, the ghost in his mind and belly gabbles on more loudly, as if eager to get out.

What will happen to Long Hair’s ghost if I die here? wonders Paha Sapa. Will both our nagi spirits fly out and up at the same time—his to whatever place wasichu spirits migrate after death, mine to the Milky Way and beyond?

There is also the irritating fact of Crazy Horse’s memories mixed in with his own. How can the spirits recognize his—Paha Sapa’s—spirit if so much a part of his consciousness is given over to that fierce heyoka’s violent and brooding memories?

He does have access to Crazy Horse’s memories of his own successful hanblečeya, back when the war chief was a young brave still called Curly Hair, but even those recollections discourage Paha Sapa. The Minneconjou boy had the full help of Thunder Dreamers such as Horn Chips and his own living father, then named Crazy Horse, as well as his entire band’s certainty that young Curly Hair would receive a Vision from the Thunder Beings and become the heyoka and war chief they wished him to be. Even the memory of young Curly Hair–Crazy Horse’s actual Vision is confusing, since it seems little more than a fuzzy dream of lightning flashing, thunder crashing, and of Curly Hair’s nagi speaking to a spirit-warrior on a spirit-horse. Of all the people on the earth, Paha Sapa knows, only he and Crazy Horse know how fuzzy and uncertain that Vision was, although it began well, with a red-tailed hawk screaming for the boy’s attention.

And it ended well, with the post-Vision purification with the older men in the sweat lodge again, and these elders and wičasa wakans—other Thunder Dreamers all—interpreting the dream as a valid Vision, anointing young Crazy Horse as a heyoka and akicita tribal policeman, and announcing to all that Curly Hair would someday be a great war chief.

Every time now that the thunder echoes through the Black Hills, Paha Sapa flinches and huddles tighter. He does not want to be a heyoka. He does not want to serve the fierce and warlike Thunder Beings. And at the same time he is ashamed of this shrinking back, this cowardice, this stubbornness in wanting to refuse his role in life if that is the will of the All.

But the Thunder Beings do not speak to him there on the summit of the Six Grandfathers, even while real thunder echoes and lightning flashes and Paha Sapa huddles in his muddy hole, fearful of lightning in such a high, exposed place.

He is, he realizes, not only a failure as a vision-seeker, but a cowardly failure.

ON THE NIGHT of his ninth day of fasting, Paha Sapa realizes that he soon will be too weak to hunt or find food even if a Vision does appear to him. That night he stumbles down the long, steep mountainside to the vale where the two staked horses still crop and drink from the stream and—with infinite and slow-motion labor—he makes four rabbit traps, which he sets in the trees and shrubs on the hillside. Then, seeing how his sintkala waksu sweat lodge seems to be melting in the continued downpour, Paha Sapa takes his robe and the pipe now hanging from his neck by a sturdy strap and makes the long, arduous climb and crawl back up to the summit ridge, arriving just in time to make offerings and prayers to a sunrise hidden behind clouds.

On his tenth day of fasting, Paha Sapa tries to fly.

He is so weak now that he spends much of his time sitting and leaning against one of the Four Directions posts as he offers the sacred pipe, but he is also so weak and light-headed that his nagi spirit-self slips easily from his body. (Afraid that it will not return, Paha Sapa entices it back with promises of a rabbit cooked to perfection over a crackling fire.)

His nagi leans into the slight breeze that blows up here most of the time, feeling the wind against his spirit-chest much as he used to feel the water in a deep part of a stream or river and be ready to kick off to float and swim, but—unlike so many times before when rising into the sky came so easily—the winds now do not bear him up.

Even his spirit is too heavy to soar.

Thus on Paha Sapa’s tenth day of fasting and mumbling of prayers and heavy-armed offering of the stem of the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa to low clouds and rain, he thinks dully of admitting failure and going home.

Crazy Horse will kill me.

But certainly Crazy Horse must have moved on by now. The war chief was planning to lead his band against the wasichus in the Black Hills and then scout out the cavalry that were coming seeking vengeance for the rubbing out of Long Hair. The chance that Crazy Horse would still be with Angry Badger’s and Limps-a-Lot’s band camped near Slim Buttes is low.

And return a total failure, never to claim a vision, never to become a wičasa wakan like my adoptive tunkašila?

Better to be a failure than to be a corpse, Black Hills. You knew you were never cut out to be a warrior, a brave…. Now you know that you were not meant to be a holy man or an important man in the tribe.

Paha Sapa comes very close to sobbing. Sitting with his back against the western post, waiting for his sunset prayers, the red banner hanging thick, wet, and soggy above him, his sullen nagi aching in his chest, and the goddamned wasichu ghost always babbling in his aching brain, Paha Sapa decides that he will stay here on the Six Grandfathers for one more night, perhaps one more wet day, before surrendering his hopes and riding home.

If the traps have not captured a rabbit, you will die, unless you slaughter Worm or White Crane.

Shaking that thought out of his head, Paha Sapa closes his eyes in the rain as he waits for the approximate time of sunset behind the lowering clouds.

HE AWAKES LYING NAKED on his back near his vision pit. It is very dark, and the clouds have gone away. The sky is ablaze with the three thousand or so tightly packed stars he is used to seeing on such a late-summer night. For a moment he is panicked, thinking that he may have dropped the sacred pipe on the steep rocky summit, but then he feels the strap and finds the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa strangely warm across his bare belly.

Shooting stars scratch across the black between-the-stars night glass of the sky. Paha Sapa remembers that this time right after his birthing day has always been rich with shooting stars. Limps-a-Lot once told him that some elders believe that the falling stars celebrate some great battle or victory or Vision that has long been lost to the memory of the Natural Free Human Beings.

Paha Sapa is content to lie there on his back, half in his Vision Pit and half out, the cooling rock of the mountain strangely dry under his shoulders and head, and watch the stars fall.

Suddenly a shooting star brighter than all the others streaks from the zenith. It is so bright that it lights up the skies, lights up the summit of the Six Grandfathers, lights up towering Evil Spirit Hill and all the other surrounding peaks. The millions of dark pine trees in the Paha Sapa suddenly grow silver and then milky white in the light of this falling star turned hurtling comet.

—Ooooh!

Paha Sapa cannot help making the noise. It is the same noise he made as a tiny boy watching the late-summer falling-star showers when there was an especially bright one. But he has never seen any star falling with such dazzling brilliance as this one.

And, he realizes with a slow stirring of what might have been fear if he’d had more energy and presence of mind, it is headed directly for him.

The shadows of the direction posts and of the few stunted trees near the rocky summit leap away in all directions from the hurtling brilliance directly above him. Paha Sapa can hear the falling star now—a hissing, roaring, galloping sound as the star burns through the air.

Suddenly, silently, the falling star explodes, dividing into six different and only slightly smaller falling stars. They continue hurtling down toward him.

Paha Sapa realizes through his hunger and exhaustion, with something like bemused detachment, that he is going to die in a few seconds.

The six fragments of the Great Star hurtle lower. Each fragment is going to strike the Six Grandfathers; one, it seems, right here on the summit. At the last moment, Paha Sapa puts his forearm over his eyes.

No impact. No explosions. No noise whatsoever except for the slightest stirring of the ponderosa pine trees and fir trees in a slight breeze.

Paha Sapa lowers his arm and peeks out.

The six stars are all around the summit but they appear now as six shafts of vertical white light. Each shaft must be two hundred feet tall. Inside each shaft or upright cocoon of light is an old man who looks to be of the Natural Free Human Beings, and each old man is wearing a perfect white buffalo robe and has one white eagle feather in his gray hair. All of them are staring at Paha Sapa, and their gaze is unlike any human gaze the boy has ever encountered. He can feel the pressure of those gazes.

—Will you come with us, Black Hills?

Paha Sapa’s head snaps around. He did not see any of their lips move. Nor did he hear the question, exactly. At least not with his ears. For many decades after this he will try to recall and describe their voices—certainly not sounds of the sort men make in their throats and mouths, or with their tongues and teeth, but more the subtle whisper of wind moving branches or the deep vibration of distant thunder felt or the slight bone-shake of approaching horse herds or buffalo such as the boy heard when, imitating the older men, he put his ear tight to the earth.

Except none of these comparisons is right either. He knows then and later that it does not matter.

—Of course I will come, Grandfathers.

One of the giant forms reaches out a hand encased in white light. Paha Sapa takes one step and realizes that all of him fits perfectly into the weathered palm.

They rise quickly and silently into the blazing night sky. Somehow, Paha Sapa can hear the sound of the stars—each star a voice, each voice a part of a chorus, the chorus of three thousand and more voices chanting a melodic prayer unlike any he has ever heard.

When they are many thousands of feet above the starlit landscape, the six forms cease rising and hover, Paha Sapa comfortable and unworried in the warm palm.

But when he finally leans over the edge of the giant, reassuringly cupped palm to look down upon the sacred Hills, Paha Sapa almost screams in terror.

The Black Hills are gone. Everything is gone.

Beneath him, beneath the hovering, cloudlike Six Grandfathers and him, an endless expanse of water stretches away to both of the distant, dark, and slightly curved horizons. The world is water without end.

Paha Sapa realizes at once that he is looking down on the world without form that existed before Wakan Tanka, the Mystery, the All, brought forth land and the four-leggeds and then man. This is the world before man, when taku wankan, the Things Mysterious, walked abroad in the spirit world: the Wakinyan Thunderbird, the Tatanka Great Beast, the Unktehi One Who Kills, the Taku Skanskan He Who Changes Things, Tunkan the Venerable One. All the pure nagi spirit-beings who walked the skies above a world still drowned in placental water and waiting to be born.

This is the all-water world that Limps-a-Lot has told him of in the Oldest Stories, but Paha Sapa has never been able to imagine it before this. Now the sea stretches out on all sides below him.

Paha Sapa realizes that the stars have been occluded by high clouds. Now there are gray clouds infinitely high above him and gray, almost waveless water infinitely far below him. He understands in his heart that the Six Grandfathers are allowing him to join them for the Birth.

Suddenly a single shaft of light—the boy knows at once that the light comes from the Mystery, the All—breaks the ceiling of clouds above and splits the intervening sky until it touches the sea below. The waters churn. Out of the World Sea rise, dripping, the hills and black trees and sacred stone of the heart of the heart of the world—the Black Hills. The shaft of light fades, but the Black Hills remain below, a tiny dark island in a vaguely glowing endless sea. For a while as Paha Sapa watches from the safety of the Grandfather’s curled palm, the only sound is of the wind caressing the trees and grasses and wavetops so far beneath him. Paha Sapa understands that the winds he hears whispering are the hushed voices of other great Spirits existing here before the first men arrived: Tate, the Wind Essence; Yate, the North Wind; Yanpa, the East Wind; Okaga, the South Wind.

To all these winds has Paha Sapa prayed and chanted alongside Limps-a-Lot, training as a boy to be a holy man someday, and to all these winds Paha Sapa now silently prays again. Their presence makes him want to weep.

The sun rises. The sunlight paints dark strokes of mountain-shadows and pine-tree-shadows on the face of the Hills and throws more shadows of small hills and isolated trees on the long meadows. Then the waters around this island world recede farther, and the prairies and plains and Maku Sichu Bad Lands emerge glistening into the light. Solid land has now replaced the covering seas from horizon to horizon. The world has become mostly maka, earth, and it is ready for the four-leggeds and the two-leggeds to live on it now.

Paha Sapa wants to ask the Six Grandfathers why they are showing him these things, but his nagi spirit-voice is too weak—or the air up here too thin—for the word-sounds to reach the Grandfathers’ ears. He can only look up and nod at the ancient, lined but friendly faces shifting slightly as towering clouds tend to shift in sacred winds.

Paha Sapa realizes that the Six Grandfathers have given him the wanblí keen vision of the eagle. When Paha Sapa looks to the southern wooded hills of the Black Hills, he can clearly see the opening of Washu Niya, “the Breathing Cave,” that sacred place that the unseeing wasichus call “Wind Cave.” He watches now with his wanblí vision as the first buffalo emerge into the light.

Paha Sapa laughs aloud, and that happy sound is louder than his weak nagi voice. Limps-a-Lot and Sitting Bull and the other wičasa wakan were right in their how-it-started stories! The first buffalo are tiny, hardly larger than ants, and just as numerous. But the rich, still birth-wet grasses in the Black Hills and wider great plains beyond soon allow the tiny bison to grow to full buffalo height and mass. Again, Paha Sapa laughs aloud. The Six Grandfathers are showing him aeons of time in these few minutes.

The sun rises higher, and now even the shadows of the bison grazing in herds on the endless windswept plains north and south of the Hills leap out in bold relief.

Paha Sapa looks south again.

The First Men crawl blinking from the Breathing Cave, rise on their hind legs, and immediately send up prayers to Wakan Tanka, to the Six Grandfathers, to the other spirits, and to the gift of Mystery itself, giving thanks for being led up out of the darkness into this new world so rich with game and alive with whispering, guarding, and sometimes wonderfully dangerous spirits.

Generations and centuries pass in minutes as Paha Sapa watches his people be born, hunt, marry, wander far, fight, worship, grow old, and die. He watches them hunt animals he has never seen or heard of before—great hairy, tusked beasts—and watches as the Natural Free Human Beings receive the gift of šunkcincala, the “sacred dog” miracle of the horse. He watches as his people spread far across the plains.

Once again Paha Sapa is able to see the Black Hills as the heart-shaped center of the endless green-and-brown prairies of the obleyaya dosho, the wideness of the world. Once again he sees the Black Hills as the entire continent’s wamakaognaka e’cantge, the heart of everything that is. More than ever before, Paha Sapa sees the Black Hills as the O’onakezin, the Place of Shelter.

He can see the Sun Dance River to the north of the Hills, what the wasichus call the Belle Fourche, and the Cheyenne River to the south. Farther to the north he can easily see the meandering line the wasichus call the Missouri River. All of these rivers are in flood stage, but the Sun Dance River the most so.

In the distance Paha Sapa can see Wapiye Olaye I’ha, the Plain of the Rocks that Heal, and the Hinyankagapa Black Buttes and the He Ska White Buttes and the Re Sla Bald Place and back again to the Washu Niya Breathing Cave in the southern part of the Hills and half a hundred landmarks in the Hills and out that would take him days or weeks of walking or riding to reach.

He can see the Hogback Ridge of reddish sandstone that borders the sunken Race Track around the Hills, like a band of muscle around a pumping heart, and can easily see the broad Pte Tali Yapa “Buffalo Gap” that allows easy access both for the four-legged animals and for the Natural Free Human Beings when they go to the mountains for sanctuary. Directly beneath him is the Six Grandfathers, nearby the higher rocky summit of Evil Spirit Hill and half a hundred other gray-granite ridges and red-rock needles and spires thrusting up out of the soft black carpet of pines that covers the Hills.

It is silent up here as the sun rises quickly again and again, far too quickly to be in the harness of regular time or motion, and the shadows grow shorter so quickly as to be amusing. Again and again the sun hurtles into the sky, arcs across the perfect blue, and sets to the prayers of the Natural Free Human Beings. But suddenly that motion slows and there comes the wind-whisper, branch-murmuring, distant-thunder careful enunciation of the soft Grandfather voice in Paha Sapa’s mind. The eleven-year-old boy suddenly feels as if he is in his and his people’s future.

—Watch, Paha Sapa.

Paha Sapa watches and at first sees nothing. But then he realizes that there is a stirring and shifting among and within the rocks of the sacred Six Grandfathers mountain a mile or two directly beneath him, a trembling and vibration along the rocky ridge summit where he can still make out his muddy Vision Pit and his five direction posts with their wilting red banners. Paha Sapa’s enhanced eagle-vision allows him to focus on things at will, almost as if he has one of the Wasicun cavalry officer’s telescopes he’s heard Limps-a-Lot describe, and now, as one of the Grandfathers points again, he looks more closely at the mountain from whence he came.

Small rocks and midsized boulders are shaking loose and sliding down the steep southern face of the Six Grandfathers Mountain. Paha Sapa sees the trees on the northern slope shake and shiver in unison. There rises a soft rumble as more rocks, large and small, tumble into the deeper valley on the south side of the sacred peak, and then Paha Sapa sees the earthquake in action as the very rock seems to become liquid, shimmering, and mile after mile of forest and meadow fold and rearrange themselves like a buffalo robe or furry blanket being shaken.

No, something is coming out of the stone.

For a moment, Paha Sapa thinks it is something erupting from the rock itself, burrowing up out of the stone, but then he swoops his vision closer and sees that it is the granite of the mountain itself that is reshaping, re-forming, emerging.

Four giant faces emerge from the south-facing cliff just beneath where Paha Sapa has been praying and lying for days and nights. They are wasichu faces, all male—although the first face to come out of the rock might be that of an old woman except for the bold thrust of chin. The second face to emerge from the granite cliff like a baby bird’s beak and head from a thick-shelled gray egg is of a Wasicun with long hair, an even longer chin than the old-lady Wasicun on the far left, and a far gaze. He is looking up at Paha Sapa and the real Six Grandfathers. The third Head has a sort of goat beard that some Wasicun affect, but strong features and infinitely sad eyes. The fourth and final head, set between the far-looker and the goat-bearded sad man, has a short mustache above smiling lips, and around the eyes are two circles of what might be metal and glass. Limps-a-Lot has talked, rather wistfully Paha Sapa thought, of these third and fourth eyes that some wasichus put on when their own eyes begin to wear out; he has even given the Wasicun word for them: spectacles.

—What…

Paha Sapa has to ask the significance of these frightening heads, no matter how puny his nagi voice sounds to his own ears.

Paha Sapa silences himself when he feels the phantom touch of an invisible Grandfather hand on his spirit-shoulder as the mountain below continues to change.

The four heads are free. Then, in a way strangely familiar to Paha Sapa from earlier dreams, come the shoulders and upper bodies, clad in granite hints of wasichu clothing. Now the four forms writhe and twist—Paha Sapa can almost hear the grunting from exertion and can hear the rumble of boulders falling into the valleys and the flap and cry as thousands of birds throughout the Black Hills take wing.

The heads must be fifty or sixty feet tall. The stone bodies, when they rise from their fetal crouches, balance, and stand, must be more than three hundred feet tall—taller than the spirit Six Grandfathers in their columns of white light.

For a moment Paha Sapa is terrified. Will these gray stone wasichu monsters continue growing until they can reach the Grandfathers and him? Will they reach up and pluck him out of the sky and devour him?

The stone Wasicun do not continue growing and do not look up at Paha Sapa or the Grandfathers again. Their attention is on the earth and on the Black Hills all around them. The giants stand there on their massive gray stone legs, two of them are actually astride the peak of the Six Grandfathers, and Paha Sapa can see them looking around with what he interprets as the same sense of wonder held by any newborn, four-legged or human.

But there is more than wonder in those four gazes. There is hunger.

Again comes the wind-pine-rustle, distant-summer-thunder whisper of one—or perhaps all—of Paha Sapa’s beloved Six Grandfathers.

—Watch.

The four Wasichu Stone Giants are striding through the Black Hills, knocking trees down in their wake. Their footprints in the soft soil are as large as some of the Hills’ scattered small and sacred lakes. Occasionally one or more of the giants will stop, bend, and rip the top of a mountain off, throwing thousands of tons of dirt to one side or the other.

Paha Sapa has the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to giggle, to laugh, perhaps to weep. Are these Wasichu Stone Giants then mere pispía—giant prairie dogs?

Then he continues to watch and has no more urge to giggle.

The four Wasichu Stone Giants are plucking animals out of the forests and meadows of the Paha Sapa: deer from the high grasses, beaver from their headwater ponds, elk from the hillsides, bighorn sheep from the boulders, porcupines from the trees, bears from their dens, coyotes and foxes and their cubs and kits from their dens, squirrels from branches, eagles and hawks from the very air….

And everything the four Wasichu Stone Giants pluck from the forest and fields, they devour. The huge gray stone teeth chew and chew and chew. The gray stone faces on the gray stone heads show no emotion, but the boy can feel their unsatiated hunger as they bend and pluck and lift and pop living things with their own souls into their gray mouths and chew and chew and chew.

Paha Sapa’s whisper is real, audible, formed by his nagi lungs and throat and mouth and forced out through his spirit-teeth, but it is also ragged.

—Grandfathers, can you stop this?

Instead of answering, the thunder-rumble, wind-in-the-needles whisper comes back with another question.

—“Wasichu” does not mean “White Person,” Black Hills. It means and has always meant “Fat Taker.” Do you see now why we gave your ancestors this word for the Wasicun?

—Yes, Grandfathers.

Paha Sapa did not know and never would have guessed that his spirit-body could feel sick to its stomach, but it does. He leans over the curling fingers of his protective Grandfather’s hand and watches.

The four Wasichu Stone Giants are striding out of the Black Hills now, each moving in one of the four primary compass directions as if guided by Paha Sapa’s poor little direction posts at his Vision Pit site. At first the boy cannot believe what he is seeing, but he uses his new eagle-vision to look carefully and his eyes are not deceiving him.

The Wasichu Stone Giants are killing buffalo and other plains animals now, using their giant stone heels on their wasichu stone shoes to squash the bison or antelope or elk before lifting the mangled carcass to their stone mouths three hundred feet above the green-and-brown-grass prairie. Somehow time has accelerated and the sun sets, the stars whirl above the Six Grandfathers and the crouching Paha Sapa, the sun rises again—a thousand times, tens of thousands of times—but the four Wasichu Stone Giants, roaming the plains to the horizon and beyond but always returning, continue to smash with their heels, to pluck and to lift, and to chew. And chew. And chew.

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 higher 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.