Black Hills

Chapter 18 Near Twin Buttes

PAHA SAPA IS RIDING IN THE RAIN. THE HORSE BENEATH HIM IS old, scabbed, and slow. And it is wearing a saddle. Paha Sapa has never ridden in a saddle before and it hurts his ass.

The hard rain keeps wiping the blood off his face, but the blood keeps returning. He does not even bother to blink it out of his eyes.

His eye. One eye is swollen shut or destroyed forever. He does not care which. The other eye sees only the blur of the fifty or sixty other men ahead of him and around him. He does not care that they are there. They are wasichu cavalry. He is dimly aware that he is their prisoner, to do with as they wish: torture, slow murder, whatever they want. He does not care.

Paha Sapa has been slipping in and out of consciousness for most of this long, wet day. He knows that he’s riding with these dark forms and he knows that his head hurts more than any pain he has ever imagined. But he also knows that the Crow—the old man named Curly—did not strike him with the rifle butt in anything meant as a killing blow. After hours of half listening to Curly, who rides nearby and continues talking in his terrible, patchy language of the Lakota—the old man uses many words from the women’s language, which makes him sound like a boy-who-decides-to-dress-and-act-like-a-woman winkte. Normally this would be terrifically amusing to Paha Sapa, but today nothing amuses him.

He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead. In a real sense, he is dead.

He has lost Limps-a-Lot’s and his band’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that was the most important and wakan object the band ever had. Oh, why had Limps-a-Lot entrusted the pipe to him, to Paha Sapa, to a miserable boy with no more sense or brains than not to look over his shoulder when traveling alone on the plains with the greatest treasure it was possible to carry?

Two great treasures, he realizes through the pain and rain. The Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, lost forever now to the swollen river, and the details of his Vision, granted by the Six Grandfathers. Limps-a-Lot and the other elders and chiefs and holy men will never listen to his Vision now, even if he were somehow to escape the wasichu cavalry. By losing the pipe, Paha Sapa has lost all credibility forever. He is sure of that. Wakan Tanka and the Six Grandfathers and all the spirits and Thunder Beings would never grant a man or boy such a Vision and then steal the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa from him. Such a loss is a statement by all the gods and powers and the All himself that Paha Sapa is not to be trusted as their servant and messenger.

His head hurts in unimaginable ways. He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead soon. He welcomes it.

Each time Paha Sapa blurs out of his semiconscious, unhearing state, wobbling in the accursed leather wedge of a saddle, the old Crow, Curly, is talking at him. This old man keeps telling him how he, Curly, saved Paha Sapa’s life by knocking him down before the Fat Takers’ bluecoats shot him just out of meanness and misery—they have been lost and separated from their main detachment for four days now, terrified because Crazy Horse is said to be on the warpath nearby—and how he, Curly, the scout, told the wasichus that the almost-naked boy who had startled all of them by crawling up out of the mud and river was a Crow boy, probably a good scout but a little stupid, a little deaf and dumb and retarded, but it was worth keeping him alive anyway and giving the slowest horse, the one that had belonged to Corporal Dunbar before he was killed, to little Billy.

Billy?

Curly… When did he tell Paha Sapa his name? He cannot remember. Curly told the wasichu bluecoats that the near-naked and mud-covered boy’s name was Bilé, which evidently is Crow for “water.” The soldiers laughed, called Paha Sapa Billy, and gave him the dead corporal’s old, scabbed, slow horse.

Paha Sapa, when he is conscious enough to form a thought, just wishes the stupid old man psaloka kagi wicasa Absaroka sonofabitch would just shut the fuck up. The words hurt Paha Sapa’s head, which already feels as if he is spilling out his brains. Sometime later in that rainy, gray, miserable day, he realizes that he has been shot by the other Crows, the wild Crows, and there is a filthy bandage wrapped around his upper arm. The bullet wound throbs. His head is going to kill him.

He has lost the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

Curly. Paha Sapa remembers through his gloom and pain and blurred one-eyed vision and through memories not his own that Tashunke-Witke, Crazy Horse, had been called Curly Hair and then just Curly when he was young, before his father, Crazy Horse, gave his own name to his son.

But this garrulous old psaloka Crow looks nothing like the Crazy Horse Paha Sapa has seen several times this summer. The Lakota Crazy Horse–Curly is blade-nosed, scarred, thin-faced…. This old Crow’s face is pocked with smallpox scars but otherwise unscarred by battle and is as round as the moon.

But he won’t shut up with his continuous babble of bad Lakota mixed with lisping girl-man vocabulary. Maybe, Paha Sapa thinks through his pain, this old Crow is the kind of winkte who likes to fuck boys. Instinctively, reflexively, Paha Sapa gropes for the long knife at his belt.

It is gone. As is his belt. His breechclout is now held up by a piece of rope given to Curly by one of the soldiers. Paha Sapa’s feet are bare in the idiot stirrups.

If this Curly tries to fuck him, Paha Sapa decides, he will gouge out the old army scout’s eyes with his thumbs and chew off his ears. But, his bruised and mourning mind insists, somehow speaking in the wasichu babble voice of the ghost he swallowed less than two months earlier, what if all the wasichu cavalry try to fuck him at once?

Paha Sapa once heard from Limps-a-Lot that Tatonka Iyotake Sitting Bull had said that it is possible for a real wičasa wakan to will himself to die… to will his own heart to stop.

Paha Sapa concentrates on that now, through his pain and absurd saddle-bouncing, but fails. Of course he cannot do it. He is not wičasa wakan and now never will be.

He is nothing at all.

Not even a captured warrior. Just a boy who has lost his tribe’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa and who should be dead but has failed even at that simple act.

Curly keeps talking all through the long, raining, bouncing, ass-sore, head-exploding, arm-aching, endless afternoon.

This detachment of wasichu cavalry was part of General Crook’s force of combined infantry and Fifth, Second, and Third Cavalry troopers that had broken off from General Terry’s column to head east to cut off the Sioux and Cheyenne who had scattered after Custer’s death on the Greasy Grass. Crook, champing at the bit (as Curly put it), had left his supply wagons behind weeks ago, taking along a mob of Shoshone scouts and a handful of Crow scouts such as Curly and his friends Three Weevils, Drinks from a Hoofprint, and Cuts Noses Off Frequently. Paha Sapa heard that a famous wasichu, a certain Buffalo Bill Cody, had returned from his Wild West Show back east to lead Crook’s column, but he wasn’t with this bunch.

The column was soon starving, unable to live off the land. They’d eaten all their packhorses, then shot and eaten many of their extra riding horses, and left hundreds of others behind. All a treasure to Crazy Horse and the other “hostiles” who are evidently trailing the cavalry that is supposed to be chasing them. Through his headache, Paha Sapa slowly understands why those Crow were on the warpath after him. The Great Plains north and east of the Black Hills have turned into an everyone-kills-everyone zone.

Five days earlier, when this full force tried to plod across the hills of mud that had been the Badlands, Crook sent this detachment of sixty-some men swinging south and east with the orders to scout for hostile braves and then meet up with Crook’s main column near the headwaters of the south fork of Grand River… near two landmarks called Slim Buttes. This detachment, as hungry as the main column despite their swing south and east to the Black Hills and Bear Butte area where game was always plentiful, is at least three days late for that rendezvous.

Despite the pain, Paha Sapa is beginning to focus on the situation when the bouncing, wet-wool-reeking wasichus reach Slim Buttes, his own destination, late that afternoon.

The Crow scouts are sent in ahead, and Curly gestures angrily for “Bilé” on his slow horse to keep up. Paha Sapa is eager to get there and he kicks the lazy nag as hard as he can with his bare heels.

The four Crows and one Lakota boy ride into the familiar valley beneath the low, wooded hills, and Paha Sapa sees at once that there has been a battle. No… not a battle… a massacre.

Most of the tipis have been burned, but the few still standing show long knife slits where women, old men, children, and even terrified warriors cut their way out of the backs of the lodges in their panic. The entire valley stinks of ashes and human and horse shit, but much worse than that smell is the overwhelming stink of death.

The four Crow ride on. Paha Sapa slides off his horse at the first sign of familiar tipis and faces.

The only thing that gives him hope is that the few intact tipis here—or shreds of tipis—sport designs that look more like old Iron Plume’s tiyospaye rather than Angry Badger’s village. Many of the bodies here are burnt—looking too small ever to have been human beings of any age or size—but some are mutilated but otherwise intact, bloated and blackened by at least three days of late-summer sunlight and heat. Insects cover them. Animals and dogs—perhaps the dogs of this very tiyospaye—have been busy at them.

But some are still identifiable.

Paha Sapa sees Angry Badger himself, the little fat warrior’s corpse bloated to three times its normal size, lying on his back near the stream. His arms are raised as if in preparation to box. Paha Sapa somehow knows the gesture is only from a tightening of the muscles and tendons so visible where the dogs and coyotes and buzzards have been feasting. The bones of both forearms gleam white in the rainy gloom.

Farther on, where Limps-a-Lot usually set his lodge, Paha Sapa finds the blackened and knife-carved corpse of Three Buffalo Woman. There is no doubt it is her, even though the wasichus cut off her large breasts. While most of her kind face is gone, he can still see the unhealed scars on her forearms and thighs where she cut strips of her own flesh to place in his wasmuha rattle for Paha Sapa’s hanblečeya only days ago.

Centuries ago.

Thirty feet away is another woman’s corpse with one leg and both arms missing, carried away, and the swollen, putrid face chewed off to the skull, eyes long taken, but her black hair, although pounded into the mud by the constant heavy rain, is still intact. It is Raven. Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife. Where Raven’s arms would have been is what is left of what was once an infant. Not hers, Paha Sapa knows. Possibly Loud Voice Hawk’s new baby by the selfish old wičasa wakan’s youngest wife, Still Sleeps. Paha Sapa can imagine Raven taking the child and attempting to save it, even during the madness of a full cavalry charge.

A few paces farther on, closer to the cottonwood trees, he finds an unburned corpse, facedown, face gone, whose bloated but somehow still-withered arms show the faded tattoos that Loud Voice Hawk was so proud of.

It looks as if everyone was killed here as Crook’s cavalry charged through, burning and shooting and chasing down warriors and women and children alike. The entire valley is churned up with the hoofprints of hundreds of cavalry horses and hundreds of ponies.

Beyond this point, all the tipis have been burned, all the bodies reduced to blackened bird bones and charred flake-flesh. One of them might be, must be, Limps-a-Lot. He would not flee and leave his wives behind. Or his friends.

The four Crow scouts come back as Paha Sapa is attempting to mount the hard-leather-saddled horse they gave him. Curly is holding a repeating rifle, stock against his thigh as he reins up. His pony is mud splattered from hoof to hindquarters. Even the oversized pony’s mane is matted and clotted with mud. Beyond him, the full detachment of cavalry has filled the valley and moved on along the ridge to the southeast.

—Thinking of running, Bilé?

Paha Sapa has not thought of running and now he wonders why. As if reading his aching mind, the old Crow laughs and says something in guttural Absaroke to the other three Crow scouts. They laugh. Curly spits and speaks again in his effeminate almost-Lakota.

—It looks like General Crook and about a hundred and fifty cavalry from their main attachment did all this and finished their business with this village just a little ways beyond—there are more Sioux women’s and children’s bodies in the ravine just over that rise—and then the whole Fifth Infantry column arrived and bivouacked on a rise about a mile from here… oh… I’d say about three days ago, based on the state of the shit. But then the tracks show that about five hundred warriors arrived in a hurry from the south, your Sioux and Cheyenne both, most likely, based on the few corpses we found—the whole bunch almost certainly led by that bastard Crazy Horse—and while Crook’s cavalry must have outnumbered the hostiles at least four to one, that crazy bastard Crazy Horse attacked… the signs are clear on that… and then fell back to repel Crook’s counterattack. It looks like the tracks of the running fight continue on down the ridge for a couple of miles. Captain Shit-for-Brains here is pressing on to close up with Crook’s main column, but we’re sure that Crazy Horse is still out there somewhere, ready to pounce. Here, you may need this, Bilé.

The old Crow tosses Paha Sapa a long-barreled Colt revolver. The thing is heavier than Paha Sapa could have imagined, and just catching it makes his head and arm throb worse and almost pulls him off the scabbed horse. He straightens.

Curly is saying—

—I don’t think Crook’s people have any supplies left and they didn’t have time to hunt before Crazy Horse’s bucks attacked, so even if we catch up to them they won’t have any food either and we… what the fuck are you doing, Bilé?

Paha Sapa is lifting the heavy revolver, holding it steady in both hands. He aims it at Curly’s fat, smug Crow face and pulls the heavy trigger three times.

The gun does not fire.

All four of the Crow scouts laugh until they’re ready to fall off their muddy ponies.

Curly digs in his vest and brings out his fist, opens it. Half a dozen cartridges gleam ever so slightly in the dying gray light. Rain beads on brass.

—When you prove yourself, Bilé—or when Crazy Horse has us surrounded and we decide to shoot ourselves rather than become his captives—then you can have these.

The four Crows surround him, their Winchester rifles cocked on their hips or thighs, bandoliers across their scarred chests, pistols in their broad belts, and Paha Sapa’s slow horse labors and wheezes to keep up as they follow the main column southwest out of the valley and along the hoof-trampled ridge.

THEY MEET UP WITH GENERAL CROOK and many hundreds of other men (Curly tells Paha Sapa that there are two thousand men in the main body), and do what they call “bivouacking”—since the wasichus are afraid to set up a real camp because of the presence of Crazy Horse and his warriors—which means hunkering down in the pouring rain with nothing but mud underneath them and their ponchos or rain gear over their heads, eating what little hardtack they have left (Curly gives Paha Sapa two bites), and trying to sleep while every fourth man takes turns holding the horses.

Paha Sapa now understands the word infantry, which Curly has used several times, not even attempting to put it into the Lakota language. Most of Crook’s men are foot soldiers. No wonder, he thinks, they were so willing to eat horses.

Eventually the grumbling and idle chatter and cursing and farting die down until there is only the sound of the heavy rain on two thousand and more slickers, the nicker of horses spooked by the wasichus’ stink of fear, and then the snoring. Curly and his three Crow scouts fall asleep quickly, lying in the mud with their heads on wads of wet wool—their horses still saddled and held by one of the wasichu troopers ordered to hold the reins through the darkness and downpour. But although Paha Sapa is more tired than he’s ever been in his life, he does not even try to sleep.

He has to think.

Curly continued babbling at him right up to the second he started snoring loudly. Paha Sapa’s head aches almost as much from the new information he’s received in the past ten hours as from the rifle stock blow to his skull.

It seems that there are different tribes of wasichus. For some reason, young Paha Sapa, in his eleven summers, has never considered such a thing, and none of the wise men in his life, including Limps-a-Lot, has ever mentioned it. But, through Curly’s effeminate gabbling, Paha Sapa knows it now and he thinks about this as he looks around on the hilltop at the hundreds upon hundreds of lumpish figures huddled under tarps and soaked blankets in the continuing rain.

Different tribes and different languages, according to Curly, although the tribe that speaks what Paha Sapa hears as “the In Glass language” seem to be in control, the way Sitting Bull and the Lakota were over the Cheyenne at the Greasy Grass. But there are also Fat Takers here in blue coats who come from tribes named (and who speak and think in) Ire Itch, Jure Man, Dutch, Pole Acky, Sweee ’D, Eye Talyun, and even a tribe called Niggers.

Paha Sapa saw these men from the Niggers tribe when the detachment joined up with General Crook’s main body this evening, and when he saw the soldiers with brown and even black skin, with their nappy hair, he was reminded of the black-Wasicun scout named Teat whom Sitting Bull called friend. And he remembers that despite Sitting Bull’s claim of protection for the wounded and slowly dying Teat at the Greasy Grass, back in the Moon of Ripening Cherries only two moons ago, the Hunkpapa woman called Eagle Robe shot and killed the black white man.

But Teat was respected in Lakota villages and, Paha Sapa presumes, as a scout for Long Hair and the Fat Takers. This makes it doubly hard to understand why he just saw some of the other wasichu cavalry and walking soldiers here berating and insulting the few buffalo soldiers he saw here from the tribe of Nigger. Certainly anyone with such black skin and hair that so very much resembles the kinky, tightly curled hair of the sacred tatanka buffalo bull itself must be considered wakan, holy, even by these Fat Taker savages. Do they not see the strange as part of Mystery and therefore sacred? Are the Fat Takers so ignorant of the universe that they don’t see blackness itself—sapa—as a harbinger of holiness, as in the paha sapa to their south as they huddle here in the night rain?

Paha Sapa’s head hurts.

But he does not allow sleep to come. Rather, he lets down some of the barriers he’s kept up for two weeks now in his attempt to keep the flood wash of Tashunke-Witke’s life memories separate from his own few years of memories.

Crazy Horse’s violent thoughts, emotions, and memories threatened to overwhelm the boy and threaten to do so now. But he needs to look there. And something about the injury to his head and arm—or perhaps something left over from the terrible Vision he has had of the wasichu Stone Heads and Giants emerging from the Black Hills—has made it easier for him to sort through the mass and mess and morass of Tashunke-Witke’s life thoughts, back to his youngest years, forward less than a year now, to five September, the Moon of the Brown Leaves, next year, when Crazy Horse will be killed while trying to surrender to this same General Crook at the Red Cloud Agency.

Somehow, Paha Sapa thinks, somewhere in this flood wash of dark thoughts and hatred and triumphs that made up the confused thoughts and future-memories of Crazy Horse at the time the war chief touched him, somewhere there is an answer to Paha Sapa’s current dilemma.

Allowing Crazy Horse’s memories to wash over him like this, even as the pounding rain does in the night, is painful. Paha Sapa leans against the wagon wheel he propped himself up against and vomits up the little bit of hardtack that Curly gave him. Now his belly is so empty, Paha Sapa thinks, that he can feel his belly button scraping against his spine.

First there are all the faces and names to glance at and thrust aside, the way a man elbows his way through a crowd: other akicita leaders like Little Big Man and Kicking Bear and He Dog. His father, called Worm now—Paha Sapa thinks of Limps-a-Lot’s solid horse, dead from the Crows’ arrows and bullets, another failure of his—and leaders Crazy Horse knew, only some of whom the boy knows, such as Man Afraid of His Horse and Red Cloud himself and Red Dog and Lone Bear and High Backbone.

That last name triggers other names associated with loss in Crazy Horse’s jumbled memory—Rattle Blanket Woman and Lone Bear and Young Little Hawk and, above all others, They Are Afraid of Her.

Paha Sapa weeps silently, his tears mixing with and being swept away by the rain, but the weeping is not for his own loss, not for the terrible Vision or for the certain death of Three Buffalo Woman and Raven and Loud Voice Hawk and Angry Badger and the other corpses flood wash of Tashunke-Witke’s life memories separate from his own few years of memories.

Crazy Horse’s violent thoughts, emotions, and memories threatened to overwhelm the boy and threaten to do so now. But he needs to look there. And something about the injury to his head and arm—or perhaps something left over from the terrible Vision he has had of the wasichu Stone Heads and Giants emerging from the Black Hills—has made it easier for him to sort through the mass and mess and morass of Tashunke-Witke’s life thoughts, back to his youngest years, forward less than a year now, to five September, the Moon of the Brown Leaves, next year, when Crazy Horse will be killed while trying to surrender to this same General Crook at the Red Cloud Agency.

Somehow, Paha Sapa thinks, somewhere in this flood wash of dark thoughts and hatred and triumphs that made up the confused thoughts and future-memories of Crazy Horse at the time the war chief touched him, somewhere there is an answer to Paha Sapa’s current dilemma.

Allowing Crazy Horse’s memories to wash over him like this, even as the pounding rain does in the night, is painful. Paha Sapa leans against the wagon wheel he propped himself up against and vomits up the little bit of hardtack that Curly gave him. Now his belly is so empty, Paha Sapa thinks, that he can feel his belly button scraping against his spine.

First there are all the faces and names to glance at and thrust aside, the way a man elbows his way through a crowd: other akicita leaders like Little Big Man and Kicking Bear and He Dog. His father, called Worm now—Paha Sapa thinks of Limps-a-Lot’s solid horse, dead from the Crows’ arrows and bullets, another failure of his—and leaders Crazy Horse knew, only some of whom the boy knows, such as Man Afraid of His Horse and Red Cloud himself and Red Dog and Lone Bear and High Backbone.

That last name triggers other names associated with loss in Crazy Horse’s jumbled memory—Rattle Blanket Woman and Lone Bear and Young Little Hawk and, above all others, They Are Afraid of Her.

Paha Sapa weeps silently, his tears mixing with and being swept away by the rain, but the weeping is not for his own loss, not for the terrible Vision or for the certain death of Three Buffalo Woman and Raven and Loud Voice Hawk and Angry Badger and the other corpses he has identified this day, or for the almost-certain loss of his beloved tunkašila, Limps-a-Lot, but for all those like They Are Afraid of Her whom Crazy Horse has lost to death.

Paha Sapa sees, not for the first time, that it is hard being a man.

Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid his mind of memories of rape and lust, of grown-man fury and of knife blades opening up bellies and cutting throats. He does not linger on Crazy Horse’s smug memories of himself counting coup or riding, arms out, across firing lines of wasichu cavalry and infantry.

But it is in the battles that Paha Sapa now searches Tashunke-Witke’s great grab heap of emotion-charged memories.

Paha Sapa searches for his own death in the coming hours and days, for Crazy Horse’s memory of killing the boy who angered him so back in the village just weeks before. Not finding that, he searches Crazy Horse’s memory of fighting the Fat Takers—so many fights, so much screaming of Hokahey! and of leading other warriors toward firing rifles and bluecoats—until he finally finds some memories of Crazy Horse and his men ambushing cavalry in the hills that must be east and a little north of here, of blue-coated wasichus falling that may well be Crook’s cavalry…. One of the dead and falling bluecoats in Crazy Horse’s memory may well be Paha Sapa himself.

In the morning, they rise before the gray dawn—everyone coughing and cold and cursing and shaking soaked blankets or ponchos and tarps—and while some brew up coffee and some troopers still have a few biscuits, Curly and the three Crow scouts merely chew on more cold hardtack. They offer none to Paha Sapa, and the boy realizes that they are going to starve him to death.

He feels the clumsy weight of the Colt revolver in his belt and prays to the Six Grandfathers for cartridges… but he knows in his heart that the Grandfathers are no longer listening to him. Perhaps they have deafened themselves to the prayers of all the Natural Free Human Beings.

—Curly, I know exactly where Crazy Horse and his men are.

The ugly old Crow repeats this to the other three scouts in his ugly Crow language, and all four men laugh. Curly spits into the mud. He is drying off his rifle with a long red cloth he has somehow managed to keep dry through the liquid night.

—You talk shit at us, Bilé… O boy made of mud and water.

—I don’t. I know just where Crazy Horse is hiding with his four hundred men. It is less than three hours’ ride on horseback from here.

The old Crow does not translate this to his fellows but just stares at Paha Sapa with those black, bulging dead-man’s eyes of his.

—How could you know?

—I’ve seen him there. I’ve been with him there. Everyone in our band knows that this is the-place-where-Tashunke-Witke-kills-his-enemies-from-ambush. Crow, Pawnee, Shoshoni, Paiute, Cheyenne, Blackfoot… even wasichu when they are stupid enough to follow him there. And you… General Crook… almost has followed him that far.

—Tell me, Bilé, and I’ll have Three Weevils or Cuts Noses Off Frequently give you one of the biscuits they’ve been hoarding.

Paha Sapa shakes his head. The motion almost makes him vomit or swoon. His skull still aches and his stomach is too empty. But he can speak.

—No. I know exactly where Crazy Horse is this morning. Exactly where he waits for Crook and the rest of you. Crazy Horse and his most important warrior-leaders—He Dog, Brave Wolf, Wears the Deer Bonnet, even Kicking Bear. But I will not tell you. I will tell Crook, through you.

Curly squints at him for a long, long moment. It is still raining. The old Crow’s long braided hair is so soaked through that globs of bear grease stand out like yellow curds in it.

Finally Curly throws himself up onto his horse, pulls the reins of Paha Sapa’s slow old horse from Drinks from a Hoofprint, and growls in his girly-language:

—Get on the horse. Follow me. If you say the wrong thing to the general or if you are wrong about where Crazy Horse is hiding, I’ll cut your throat, scalp you, and cut your balls off myself. All while you watch, Water Boy.

PAHA SAPA has never paid much attention to individual wasichus; except for the black ones, they all sort of blur together in his vision and memory. In truth, the majority of Wasicun he has seen have been dead.

But General George Crook—he learns the full name only much later, as well as the nickname the Apaches had for him, Gray Fox—is somewhat more memorable than the corpses. The wasichu war chief has taken off his broad-brimmed hat to wring it out as lesser men prepare his mount for the day’s riding, and Paha Sapa sees a tall man with short hair that’s grown erratically into clumps on the narrow head. His face has been deeply tanned in his months in the sun pursuing Paha Sapa’s people, but the forehead is startlingly white. Beneath the jug ears begin side-whiskers that soon leap off the man’s face and down onto his shoulders, crawling almost to his chest. The general doesn’t have a real beard, just those wild side-whiskers that have spilled down onto his neck and crept back to meet under that weak excuse for a chin. Crook’s mustache is just an afterthought, a meek little bridge between two great statements of untended hair.

Crook’s tiny eyes squint at his Crow scout as Curly, shuffling in abasement and apparent embarrassment, conveys Paha Sapa’s statement that he knows where Crazy Horse is hiding this very minute.

The watery little eyes fix on Paha Sapa for a moment, and the Wasicun says something to Curly.

The Crow’s Lakota is worse than ever as he mumbles to Paha Sapa.

—The general wants to know what you want. Why you would tell him this. What do you want in exchange?

Paha Sapa is so exhausted and starved that he looks at the Wasicun without fear. Just a few days ago—an eternity ago—he, Paha Sapa, stood in the hands of one of the Six Grandfathers and spoke to them. How can he fear a mere Wasicun general?

He tells the truth.

—I don’t want anything. I just want to let you know where Crazy Horse is waiting for you.

Well, it is almost the truth. Paha Sapa does want something for himself—he wants to die.

He’s thought about the ways. Limps-a-Lot instilled a great revulsion in the boy for the very idea of taking one’s own life. Of course, Paha Sapa could just try to flee on his slow horse and Curly or one of the other Crows or perhaps a wasichu trooper would do him the service of shooting him dead. But this does not appeal to Paha Sapa. Not after the Vision of the Great Stone Heads.

Paha Sapa knows that he will die if he can escape and present himself to Crazy Horse somewhere about ten miles to the northeast—from the fragments of Tashunke-Witke’s future memories, Paha Sapa is almost certain where the heyoka war chief and his warriors are waiting—but Paha Sapa does not want to die alone that way either.

But, if he tells this Crook the truth about where Crazy Horse is waiting, just beyond the citadel place where Lakota war parties looking for Crows so often camp, ten miles or so from here, Paha Sapa has no doubt that this General Crook and his two thousand men will attack Crazy Horse and his four hundred warriors. After all, isn’t this the reason Crook and all these men have marched and ridden more than four hundred miles through summer heat and this odd, endless summer rain—to find and punish and kill Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Cheyenne who killed Custer?

And then, in that attack, Paha Sapa will ride near the front of the attack, with no weapons, slow horse and all. And then he will be cut down by Crazy Horse’s men’s bullets, even as Crook cuts down Crazy Horse and his followers.

It is a good day to die.

The general is speaking. Curly has said something. Paha Sapa looks at the old man inquisitively.

—Gray Fox says—Where? Tell us!

Paha Sapa tells them exactly where his memories of Crazy Horse’s memories from what is still Paha Sapa’s future tell him the warrior and his men are waiting. Just beyond the good camping place, less than ten miles to the northeast. Where the wooded hills begin, not far from the citadel camping place. Right where the rippled valleys begin running nothwest toward the Little Missouri River and northeast toward the Grand River.

Curly translates all this. General Crook does not call for a map or talk to any of his aides. The tall man continues squinting down at Paha Sapa.

Finally, as if making a decision, the wasichu warrior chief shouts two words in the In Glass language—

—Mount up!

YEARS AND DECADES LATER, Paha Sapa will consider telling the story of these days and hours to his wife, Rain, or to his son, Robert. He never does, of course. He never mentions a word of any of it.

But he will compose some of the chaos of those days into a sort of sequence, and had he spoken of such personal things that he never would have spoken of, putting himself into the third person as was his mental habit, the explanation would have gone something like this:

Paha Sapa’s eagerness to die that day actually did not have enough energy in it to be called “eagerness.” He was so tired, so hollow, so beaten, so lost, that he wanted others to take care of it for him.

Decades later, he would hear others—whites and even many Indians from different tribes—say that Crazy Horse on his deathbed (and before that on the battlefield at Greasy Grass, where he had ridden against Custer) had shouted “Hokahey!” which, they said, meant “It is a good day to die!”

Bullshit, thought Paha Sapa when he finally heard this (showing off some of his new In Glass wasichu vocabulary). Hokahey! in a battle meant “Follow me!” and could also mean “Line up!” as in a Sun Dance Ceremony, or, with someone dying, could mean “Stand solid, stand fast—there is more to follow.”

It did not mean “It is a good day to die,” although this was said often enough by Lakota warriors. Having opened his mind to Crazy Horse’s memories, he had far too many incidents of the warrior saying that to his men or hearing someone else say it. But in Lakota that phrase would have been something like Anpetu waste’ kile mi!—and Paha Sapa did not have the energy to cry such a thing that day anyway.

He had failed at his hanblečeya, receiving the worst Vision imaginable and not even succeeding in taking it to his tunkašila and the other holy men and warriors of his village before they were killed. He had lost his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

He had lost his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

He wanted to die that day and if he could trick this strange-whiskered General Crook and all his starving washichus and Shoshoni and Crow scouts into dying with him by leading them into an ambush of Crazy Horse’s, so much the better.

Could the future be changed? Could Paha Sapa’s visions-forward be false… or at least be changed by someone, by him, who saw them ahead of time?

If so, he hoped that Crazy Horse would also die this day, in battle, shot down by one of Crook’s two thousand soldiers or cavalry rather than by being bayoneted or shot twelve months hence—Crazy Horse’s future memories were confused—while in the disgraceful process of surrendering to this same small-eyed, large-whiskered wasichu general at the Red Cloud Agency.

But the day dragged on much longer and more slowly than Paha Sapa could have imagined.

Two hours’ or three hours’ ride meant eight hours and more marching for these starved, exhausted foot soldiers. Crook sent cavalry ahead, of course, including two of the Crow scouts—Curly and Drinks from a Hoofprint stayed behind to guard him—but even though they marched at the rainy September dawn, the main body didn’t come up to the natural citadel and amphitheater that Paha Sapa had in mind until midafternoon. Once there, Crook ordered a camp to be set up on the citadel—a natural outcropping with steeper, pine-topped crags on three sides. They started up cooking fires and buried one of the wounded who’d died in the jolting ambulance wagon that day.

Paha Sapa was half sleeping in the saddle, too exhausted even to climb down from his slow horse, when there came the rifle crack of Winchesters.

Crazy Horse had arrived.

Later, Paha Sapa understood that the war chief had mustered about five hundred of the Cheyenne and Lakota who’d been camping nearby and who had been roused by word of Crook’s cavalry’s attacks on the Minneconjou, Sans Arcs, and Hunkpapa villages—mostly against Iron Plume’s tiyospaye—near Slim Buttes. Crazy Horse had waited in ambush right where Paha Sapa had “remembered” him being—just a mile or two beyond this citadel crag—but upon hearing that all of Crook’s army had been brought up, delivered to him, Crazy Horse attacked, even with the odds more than four to one against him.

When he’d assembled his men, Paha Sapa realized, Crazy Horse had thought he’d be going into battle against only the 155 or so men under Captain Mills’s detachment—the wasichu cavalry who’d attacked and burned the Slim Buttes villages, including Angry Badger’s and Limps-a-Lot’s tiyospaye. But now Tashunke-Witke found himself confronted by Crook’s entire pursuing army. The heyoka attacked anyway.

Crazy Horse had beaten and humiliated General Crook on the Rosebud and he tried the same strategy again here—a general charge to release Crook’s Indian captives and to stampede the horses and captured ponies.

This time it did not work.

Crook committed his whole force. With the cavalry protecting his exposed eastern flank, the general sent his infantry and hundreds of dismounted cavalry directly at the wooded hills from where Crazy Horse’s men were laying down a steady volley of fire.

Paha Sapa and Curly rode forward into the smoke and confusion. This was worse than Greasy Grass, Paha Sapa thought as he watched wasichus and Indians running and falling and writhing and screaming. It was certainly worse for Crazy Horse.

The range and accuracy of the infantry’s long rifles was what made the difference—what made this outcome so very different from Custer’s fate at Greasy Grass. The far right of Crazy Horse’s line was the first to give way. Paha Sapa and Curly rode with the few cavalry and scouts advancing with the wasichu as they took the string of hilltops, wreathed as they were with clouds of acrid-smelling gunsmoke. The rain had relented for a few hours, but the air was so hot and humid and thick that Paha Sapa’s new blue coat was plastered to his bare skin. The gunsmoke stung his one working eye.

He actually saw Crazy Horse then—riding his white horse, naked except for his breechclout and single white feather, waving his rifle in the air and commanding his warriors to fall back in order.

But as they fell back, Crook’s infantry continued advancing, the wasichu cavalry lunging and harassing Crazy Horse’s depleted band of warriors from both sides and the rear. For what seemed a long time that afternoon, the battle turned into a protracted, running duel with a no-man’s-land of bullets and arrows filling a five-hundred-yard gap between the lunging, firing, swearing mobs of red man and white.

Paha Sapa and Curly had ridden to the left of the main advance just as there came a wild, brave Lakota charge at the Third Cavalry position there. The Indians—many on foot, those on horseback in clumps and disordered groups—charged forward, firing their own repeater rifles, probing for a weak spot in the Third Cavalry’s dismounted defensive positions. Paha Sapa again was sure that it was Crazy Horse he saw riding back and forth through the thick smoke, urging on the attack, turning back Lakota who had turned to flee, always in the thick of the fiercest action.

Paha Sapa used his bare heels to kick his slow horse into some sort of advance—an awkward, reluctant, clumsy canter—and the boy rode out into the killing zone between the charging Lakota and the firing Third Cavalry. He rode straight toward the half-seen Crazy Horse on the horizon. Paha Sapa dimly remembered the unloaded Colt revolver in his belt and now he drew the useless weapon and waved it in the air, the better to get the attention of the rifle- and pistol-firing Natural Free Human Beings ahead of him.

The air was so thick with bullets that he could hear and feel them buzzing around him. It’s true what the warriors said around the village fire, he thought idiotically. Bullets sound like bees in the middle of a real battle.

Paha Sapa was content. His only regret was that he had never composed his Death Song. But, he realized, he did not deserve a Death Song.

He had lost Limps-a-Lot’s and his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

A bullet ripped through his sodden blue soldier coat under his arm but did not touch his skin. Another bullet plowed a shallow furrow in his upper thigh. A bullet struck the horn of the saddle, making his slow horse stagger and almost knocking Paha Sapa off the horse. The boy was certain, based on the sudden stab of pain, that a Lakota warrior had shot his balls off, but he stood in the stirrups and looked down, suddenly not so sanguine, and saw no blood. He rode on, waving his pistol and screaming at his fellow Lakota to kill him.

Another bullet creased his skull just above the swollen lump where Curly had clubbed him the previous morning. It did not knock Paha Sapa out this time, and he blinked away the new blood and kicked at the ribs of the slow, lazy, but terrified horse.

A bullet tore away part of his sleeve and the filthy bandage covering his earlier bullet wound from the Crows but did not touch him. Paha Sapa kept hearing buzzing, hissing noises and feeling his oversized blue coat leap up as if there were a strong breeze, but other than the new scratches on his brow and upper leg, nothing touched him.

Paha Sapa would think of this hour fourteen years later when the Paiute prophet Wovoka promised all those who wore the Ghost Dance Shirt that bullets would not and could not touch them. Paha Sapa was wearing a flea-infested, sweat-and-wet-wool-stinking oversized dead wasichu soldier’s blue coat that day, but bullets would not and could not touch him.

Crazy Horse and his surviving warriors were falling back. Crook’s infantry was cheering and charging and firing as they went, and the Third Cavalry was sweeping in from the left, shooting the Lakota wounded and stragglers alike, taking no prisoners.

Paha Sapa’s scabbed, slow horse would move no farther. At first Paha Sapa thought it had been shot—how could anything that large not have been shot in that air so filled with flying lead?—but the nag was simply being stubborn in its terror and had stopped to graze there in the middle of the killing field.

Paha Sapa kicked at the horse’s ribs and sawed and tugged at the reins until the stupid beast turned around and began plodding back toward the line of firing wasichu infantry and dismounted cavalry that had not yet charged. Paha Sapa was still brandishing his unloaded pistol, now hoping and expecting Crook’s soldiers to kill him.

Instead, the wasichu soldiers raised their rifles and cheered. And then they came at Paha Sapa and the retreating Lakota, some running, some of the cavalry trying to mount their panicked horses, with horses and would-be riders whirling in confusion, all their hunger forgotten in their sudden bloodlust to get at the retreating Lakotas.

Paha Sapa slumped in his bullet-shattered saddle and let the slow horse plod him back behind the lines. Finally the nag stopped to graze again, and Paha Sapa slid out of the saddle and landed on his ass, too weak and drained to stand.

Soldiers milled around him. Suddenly Curly was there, face distorted as he jumped off his pony. The old Crow stood over Paha Sapa seated there in the mud, his forearms on his bare knees, and the scout raised and cocked his own Colt revolver.

—Lakota Water Boy, Bilé, Three Weevils and Cuts Noses Off Frequently are dead, killed in this ambush you led us into.

Paha Sapa looked up then. And smiled.

—Good. I hope their corpses are already filled with maggots and that their spirits stay in the mud forever.

Curly grunted and aimed his big pistol at Paha Sapa’s face.

This way, then, O Six Grandfathers? All right. I am sorry I did not compose my Song.

Horses slid to a stop, sending mud flying over Paha Sapa and the old Crow scout. It was General Crook, beaming through his idiot’s whiskers, and a cluster of officers and the guidon carrier. The general was babbling In Glass wasichu talk at Curly before his horse was to a full stop—no one seemed to notice the aimed pistol.

Curly’s round, stupid face gaped up at the wasichu war leader for a full minute before the Crow lowered the pistol and eventually lowered the cocked hammer gently down.

Then Crook and his men were gone.

Curly laughed the laugh of the not quite sane. He spat in the mud and looked at the pistol in his hand.

—Gray Fox says that he knows you, Billy with the Slow Horse, are really Lakota, not Crow, but he welcomes you to be his scout for as long as he, Crook, Gray Fox, commands soldiers and cavalry troopers. He says your courage…

Curly’s face contorted as if the Crow were going to vomit, but he only spat again.

—… he says he will never forget your courage today and only hopes his other scouts learn from it. Oh… and Gray Fox said to me that you are a skeleton and that if Drinks From a Hoofprint and I don’t feed you well and keep you alive, he will hang us both from the first stout tree he finds.

Curly laughed that insane-man’s laugh again. Paha Sapa could only stare at him.

THAT NIGHT Paha Sapa slept, in the rain with no blanket or tarp covering him, for eight hours. Before dawn the bugles blew and Paha Sapa looked forward to another battle.

But no… despite the sound of continued shots between Crazy Horse’s warriors and a rear guard of cavalry and infantry commanded by Bear Coat, Captain Mills… and despite almost six months of searching for the Lakota warriors, two months of that time without any food except horseflesh, and with the two thousand men dedicated to revenge after Custer’s death… Crook was leaving the battlefield.

They’d crossed a wagon trail used by miners headed for the Black Hills, and now Crook put 1,700 of his starving men on that trail. Crazy Horse and his warriors pursued, sniping from the rear and sides day after day, making feints at night, but Crook refused battle.

Except for some two hundred Indian ponies and five thousand pounds of meat they’d stolen in the Indian camps they’d overrun at Slim Buttes, the long-wanted and long-awaited fight with Crazy Horse had shown no victory for Crook and his men. They’d come all the way from the center of Wyoming Territory, having left Fort Fetterman there on March 1 in a heavy snowstorm, and now, after all these months and miles… Crook kept refusing battle with Crazy Horse and the hostiles as the long column of men and horses staggered south into the Black Hills.

Paha Sapa entered his sacred paha sapa again with a growing sense of disbelief and disconnection. These muddy wagon roads and the stinking mining town of Deadwood near where Crook’s depleted army finally came to a halt and camped had nothing to do with the Black Hills of Paha Sapa’s world. The hairy wasichus here were tearing into the heart of the living hills to find their gold, just as Paha Sapa’s Vision had shown him.

General Crook was summoned off to Fort Laramie for a meeting with someone named General Sheridan.

Curly and the other scouts now could beat Paha Sapa as much as they wanted, but they were still afraid to kill him.

Paha Sapa, on the other hand, was free to run away… leave his stupid slow horse and infected blue coat, steal a real horse, and simply ride back out onto the Great Plains to find his people. He could have avoided Crazy Horse’s warriors and swung far west and then north to the white reaches of Grandmother’s Country to try to find Sitting Bull and other survivors he might know up there.

He did not do that. He could not do that. He was without any people, without any family, without any tiyospaye of his own.

He had led Crook’s army to Crazy Horse, and many Natural Free Human Being warriors had died that day.

He had lost the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

When the survivors of the Starvation March lined up again and rode and marched behind Crook to Fort Robinson south of the Black Hills toward the Nebraska River, Paha Sapa—Billy Slow Horse—went with them.

He was beginning to learn wasichu English—not In Glass—and the first word he learned from the troopers was useful, both noun and verb—fuck. Eventually that winter they trusted him with a knife, and he mastered the phrase “If you try it, I’ll cut your balls off. ”

It was a long winter and spring and summer for Paha Sapa, and learning English meant that he now understood the lusty babblings of Long Hair’s ghost in his mind every night. And there was no longer any doubt that the ghost was Long Hair—Custer himself. Paha Sapa did his best to seal off the ghost and to mute the words.

Paha Sapa was no longer with Crook and the Army on September 5 the next year—1877 as the wasichus counted years—when Crazy Horse came in to surrender and was bayoneted to death. He, Paha Sapa, had already seen that death too many times; he did not want to see it in person and he knew he could not change it.

That August—in the Moon of the Ripening again, around his birthday and the first anniversary of his Vision—Paha Sapa had left the army and Fort Robinson quietly. No one chased him. Curly had died of appendicitis two months before and no one else paid any attention to the presence or absence of an eleven- or twelve-year-old Indian boy.

Paha Sapa returned to the Black Hills, but not to hunt or camp or worship. He came back to the stinking mining town of Deadwood to find work or to steal.

And there, already in jail after failing at his first attempt to steal and probably facing death by hanging, he met the holy men who dressed in black like ravens or crows with their white collars and who had their absurd tent school on the hill.

And if he had ever told that story to Rain or to Robert, he would have added that while the wasichus talked of the Starvation March and of the Battle for Slim Buttes, the Lakota forevermore referred to that battle—that battle where young Paha Sapa had led General Crook straight to Crazy Horse—as the Fight Where We Lost the Black Hills.