Black Hills

Chapter 21 The Six Grandfathers

AFTER RIDING THE ABOMINABLE TRAMCAR BACK UP THE MOUNTAIN and standing there looking down at the Hall of Records canyon while listening to Gutzon Borglum talk about blasting out the rock saved for the Theodore Roosevelt head, Paha Sapa willingly rides with his boss down on the same tramcar rather than face the 506 steps again. He’s descended them once this hot August evening, and he hurts too much to do it again.

It’s the pain rather than the rock dust and sweat that sends Paha Sapa straight home to his shack in Keystone. Rather than make dinner—it’s almost seven p.m. by the time he gets home—he builds a fire in the woodstove, despite the remaining intense heat of the day, and heats up two big tubs of water he’s pumped outside. It takes six of these big buckets to get enough water in his bathtub for a real bath, and by the time he’s poured in the last two steaming tubs, the water from the first two are cooling off.

But most of it is still steaming hot as he strips off his work clothes and boots and socks and settles into the claw-footed freestanding bathtub.

The pain from the cancer has become a problem. Paha Sapa feels it creeping up from his colon or prostate or lower bowels or wherever it’s advancing from—threatening to overwhelm him for the first time in his frequently pain-filled life—and stealing his strength. His one great secret ally has been his strength, quite unusual for a man of his modest weight and height, and now it is leaking away like the heat from this water or like the water itself once he pulls out the plug.

Once dressed in clean clothes, Paha Sapa goes to feed the donkeys before he feeds himself.

They are both there in their rough new pen, both Advocatus and Diaboli. Paha Sapa refills their water and makes sure they have grain to eat as well as the hay scattered around their enclosure. Diaboli tries to bite him, but Paha Sapa is prepared for that. He is not prepared for Advocatus’s sideways kick and that catches Paha Sapa squarely in the upper thigh, numbing his entire leg for a moment and causing him to have to lean on the fence while fighting the nausea rising in him.

The donkeys belong to Father Pierre Marie in Deadwood, the truly ancient priest and only survivor of the three friars who taught a young Indian boy so long ago, and Paha Sapa has promised to get the animals back by Saturday afternoon. He rented the old Dodge flatbed—the same one that transported the submarine engines from Colorado—from Howdy Peterson’s cousin, also from Deadwood, and Paha Sapa put fresh straw and hay in the now-fenced-in flatbed to transport the donkeys from Deadwood. He needs the truck again tonight but he plans to return it to Howdy after hauling the donkeys home early Saturday morning.

That is, if he doesn’t blow himself and the Dodge to tiny bits tonight in the transfer of the dynamite. He plans to drive the donkeys to the site first and tie them up in the woods below the canyon, so that they don’t blow if the dynamite and he and the truck do on the next trip. With that possibility in mind, Paha Sapa has already written a note asking Hap Doland, his nearest neighbor there in Keystone, to drive the donkeys home “should something unforeseen happen to me.” The note is propped on his mantel. (Although he imagines that it will be the sheriff or Mr. Borglum who comes to the shack first, not Hap.)

Donkeys fed, Paha Sapa goes in to make some beans and franks and coffee for himself. He’s very tired and though the hot bath distracted him, this time it has not leached away any of the pain. Paha Sapa wonders if he should have taken the Casper doctor up on his offer of morphine tablets to be dissolved and injected with a syringe.

After dinner, with the Keystone valley in shadow—the evenings are growing shorter now at the end of August—and with V-tailed swallows and terns slicing the air into chorded arcs of pale blue in search of insects and the first bats emerging to their zigzag flights, Paha Sapa starts up Robert’s rackety motorcycle and drives the three miles up to Mune Mercer’s cabin.

The cabin looks dark as Paha Sapa approaches and for a moment he thinks he has lost his gamble that Mune wouldn’t have enough money to be out getting drunk this particular Friday night. Then the door opens and a huge, hulking form—Mune is six-foot-six and must weigh close to 300 pounds—steps out onto the rickety porch.

Paha Sapa turns off the motorcycle’s little engine.

—Don’t shoot, Mune. It’s me, Billy.

The massive silhouette grunts and lowers the double-barreled shotgun.

—’Bout goddamned time you got here, Slow Horse, Slovak, Slow Ass. You promised me the night work and money more ’n three weeks ago, goddamn your half-breed eyes.

Mune is fair on the way to getting drunk, Paha Sapa sees and hears, but only on his private moonshine, which will probably blind him within a year if it doesn’t kill him first. Paha Sapa can see now that there is the slightest lantern glow visible through the open door but that the blinds are closed tight on the front windows.

—You going to invite me in, Mune? I’ve got the details about tomorrow night’s job and I brought what’s left of a fifth for you.

Mune grunts again but takes a step sideways to allow Paha Sapa to squeeze through into the cluttered, filthy, and foul-smelling one-room cabin.

Mune Mercer, whose first name—probably a family name—has always been pronounced “Moon,” was invariably called “Moon Mullins” during the short time he worked on the Monument as a winch man and general laborer, and, like the cartoon character, Mune is rarely seen, even on the mountain, without his undersized derby squeezed down onto his short-stubbled dome of a skull and an unlit stogie clamped in his teeth. Mune even has a scruffy and surprisingly petite mutt who, like Moon Mullins’s little brother (or is he his son?), is named Kayo and, like the kid in the comic strip, sleeps in a lower drawer of a dresser next to Mune’s bed. Kayo—the canine version—looks up sleepily at Paha Sapa but does not bark. Paha Sapa wonders if the mutt has also been drinking.

There are two chairs at the small rough-planked table near the sink with a short-handed pump and stove and Paha Sapa drops tiredly into one without being invited to sit. He takes out the fifth of whiskey, about a third full, and sets it on the table.

—I see you helped your own fucking self to most of it. Some fucking gift, Tonto.

Paha Sapa blinks at the subtlety of the insult. There’s a sidekick Indian character named Tonto on a new cowboy radio drama that premiered on a Detroit radio station, WXYZ, the previous February. WXYZ is powerful enough that frequently, when the atmospherics are right, listeners with good sets or an understanding of the ionosphere can pick it up out here in the Hills. Paha Sapa has actually heard the station—and that cowboy show with the great opening music—on the earphones he had added to the little crystal set that Robert built the summer before he went into the Army, twenty years ago.

Paha Sapa smiles slightly and looks around the garbage heap of a room. The sheets on Mune’s unmade bed, once white, are mostly a caked yellow now.

—Tonto? Cute, Mune. I don’t see your radio, though. How have you been listening to The Lone Ranger?

Mune lets out a boozy breath and drops into his chair at the table. The chair groans but does not quite collapse.

—What the fuck’s the Lone Ranger? Tonto means “stupid” in Spanish, Tonto.

Well, so much for subtlety.

Mune is a dimwit but was a decent winch man the few weeks he worked at Mount Rushmore. But he is a drunkard as well as a dimwit—and a drunken Mune, it turns out, is invariably a mean Mune—and although Mr. Borglum tends to look the other way when men come to work hungover on Saturdays or even Mondays, he will not abide any drinking on the job or someone like Mune Mercer, who came in hungover every day of the week. Out on the cliff face, men’s lives depend upon the sobriety and sound judgment of the other men—especially winch men—and Mune was hungover, red-eyed, and surly until ten or eleven every morning.

When he wasn’t drunk, Mune was mostly a gentle dimwit giant, and the other workers tried to cover for him—for a while—but when Mr. Borglum, who’d been traveling, finally saw the truth of the matter, he fired Mune’s huge butt the same day.

So Mune had been both surprised and suspicious a week earlier when Paha Sapa came to him with the offer of a truly spectacular fifty dollars in exchange for some night work at the Monument.

Mune, mouth open and beady little eyes squinting under his derby, had cocked his giant thumb of a head to one side to show his cynicism.

—Night work? Whaddya talking about, ’breed? There ain’t no night work on Rushmore ’cause there ain’t no lights for it, so there’s no fucking night work.

—There will be a week from now, Mune—on the weekend before the president arrives on Sunday the thirtieth. You have heard the rumors about FDR coming up to the mountain, haven’t you?

—No.

One of the nice things about Mune Mercer is that he is never defensive or apologetic about his ignorance, which is vast.

Paha Sapa smiled then, a week ago this very night, and presented Mune with a full bottle of cheap whiskey, and said—

—Well, it seems sure now that the president is coming, on Sunday the thirtieth, Mune, and there’s going to be a big celebration and unveiling of the Jefferson head and Mr. Borglum wants me and you to do some night work so we can prepare a surprise he has in store for the president and for all the VIPs. And, for whatever reason, he wants this to be a surprise even for the rest of the guys working on the hill. And because we have to work alone and at night—but Mr. Borglum says it’ll be almost a full moon that Saturday night—he’s willing to pay us each fifty dollars.

Mune squinted his suspicion then, just as he is doing now. Fifty dollars is a fortune.

—Why would Mr. Borglum want me, Mr. Billy Half-breed? He fired me, remember? Right in front of all the fellows. Is he hiring me back for good?

Paha Sapa shook his head.

—No, Mune. Mr. Borglum still doesn’t want a drunk on the payroll. But, like I said, he wants this to be a surprise for all the other workers and their wives, as well as for President Roosevelt and Senator Norbeck and the governor and the rest of the high muckety-mucks down below in the reviewing stand. It’s a onetime deal, Mune… but it’s fifty dollars.

Mune looked more ridiculous than usual that night as he squinted beneath his derby and above his cold cigar stump until his thin slits of eyes disappeared (as they are starting to now) in folds of lashless fat.

—Show me the money.

Paha Sapa brought out a wad of money, almost a year’s savings for him, and pulled fifty dollars from the roll.

—What’s so secret that Mr. Borglum would pay me an’ a half-breed to set it up at night? He going to blow up his own fucking heads or something?

Paha Sapa laughed politely at that, but his skin grew cold and clammy.

—It’ll be a sort of fireworks display. I guess there will be newsreel cameras there and Mr. Borglum wants to surprise everyone with a real spectacle.

—You sayin’ that that nigger lover Roosevelt is coming at night?

—No. Sometime in late morning, I think. While the shadows on the faces are still good.

—A fireworks show in the middle of the day. That don’t make no fucking sense.

Paha Sapa shrugged, obviously as amused by the Old Man’s whims and eccentricities as Mune was.

—It’s a fireworks show with quite a bit of dynamite behind it, Mune. I guess it’s going to be in the form of a twenty-one-gun salute to the president… you know, like the military gives him when the band plays “Hail to the Chief ”?… but with little blasts the whole length of the Monument, moving some of the stone that we’re gonna have to move anyway but making it sound like like a formal cannon salute. Anyway, Mr. Borglum said I could hire you for this one night only, partially because you’re not in touch with many people and won’t blab, but I have other men I can hire if you don’t want to do it. It’s fifty dollars, Mune.

—Gimme my fifty now. In, you know, advance.

Paha Sapa gave him only five one-dollar bills, knowing that Mune would spend it on booze in the first two days and be relatively sober by the time he, Paha Sapa, needed him the next weekend.

MUNE DRINKS FROM THE BOTTLE of the fifth, not offering to clean a glass to give Paha Sapa any. Seeing the state of the two glasses in the sink, Paha Sapa is glad there is no offer to share.

—I need another ten bucks.

Paha Sapa shakes his head.

—Look, Mune. You know Mr. Borglum won’t pay you the rest until the job’s done tomorrow night. I’m working with Jack Payne all day tomorrow on the drilling in preparation for this surprise… and since Jack already knows that something’s up, I might as well give the night work to him and pay him the fifty bucks… or I should say the forty-five that’s left. I know he’ll show up sober tomorrow night.

—Palooka? Fuck him. You and the old man offered this job to me, you fucking sack of half-breed shit. Try to Jew me out of it and…

Mune tries to raise his bulk out of the chair but Paha Sapa stands and easily pushes him back down. The moonshine is powerful stuff and Mune has probably been hitting it since Tuesday.

—Then sober up tomorrow—I’m serious about that. If you’re drunk or even seriously hungover when I come to fetch you tomorrow night, Mr. Borglum has ordered me to go get Payne or someone else. I mean it, Mune. Be stone sober tomorrow night or this fifty bucks goes to someone else.

Mune sticks out his lower lip like a scolded, sulking child. Paha Sapa thinks that if the drunken dimwit starts crying, he—Paha Sapa—will kill him. For not the first time in his life, he feels the terrible Crazy Horse joy rising in him at the thought of sinking a hatchet deep into the prescalped skull under that stupid derby.

—What time you comin’ for me tomorrow night, Billy?

Paha Sapa lets out a breath in relief.

—A little before eleven p.m., Mune.

—Do I get paid then?

Paha Sapa doesn’t even bother shaking his head at a question that stupid.

—In the morning. Before dawn. When we’re done. Mr. Borglum may show up to check the work and pay you himself.

—Hey, you already got the money! I saw it last week!

—That was for another job, Mune. Look, I talked Mr. Borglum into giving you this last job just as my favor to you. Don’t screw it up.

Mune tries to squint harder but his squint is as tight and narrow as it can go.

—Which winch will I be usin’?

—All four of them, I think. I’ll check with Mr. Borglum tomorrow, but I think we’ll be using all four.

—Four? There are only three winches on the face now, you stupid half-breed. I come by now and then, y’know. There’re only three on the heads.

—Only three working above the heads right now, it’s true. But there’s the one on the backside from last year. I guess we’ll be lifting some stuff from the Hall of Records canyon. Oh, and Mune?

—What?

Paha Sapa lifts his loose shirt. The long Colt revolver given to him by Curly the cavalry scout sixty years ago next week is tucked into his waistband. In the intervening years, Paha Sapa has found cartridges for it and was test firing as recently as yesterday. The nice thing about well-built weapons, he thinks, is that they’re never really obsolete.

—Just this, Mune. You call me half-breed or Tonto once again, and I don’t care how drunk you are, I’ll blow your fucking dim-witted head clean off your fucking fat carcass. Is that clear, you big, stupid sack of shit?

Mune nods docilely.

Paha Sapa goes out to the motorcycle. It starts on the first kick. The long-barreled revolver is absurdly uncomfortable in his waistband so Paha Sapa tosses it onto the leather seat of the sidecar.

A LITTLE BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Paha Sapa drives the donkeys up to the mountain first, just as he planned. Even as he shifts the gears of the screeching hulk of a truck, he knows it is a stupid plan. He should have just put the donkeys in with the dynamite and blasting caps and made one trip out of it. If the dynamite were to go up, so would most of the town of Keystone—what are two damned, lazy old donkeys one way or the other? Paha Sapa has never had much use for anything—man or beast—that doesn’t work to earn its keep in the world, and these donkeys haven’t done any labor harder than hauling Father Pierre Marie’s mail or groceries up the hill from Deadwood to the church and priest’s cabin once a week or so.

Well, that will change tonight. The asses—and the ass of the old man currently driving them up the hill—will do some serious work for a change this night.

Advocatus and Diaboli are quiet back there during the ride. They were very unhappy when Paha Sapa lashed the clumsy slippers made out of burlap over their hooves before loading them onto the truck, but apparently the two donkeys think that they are being driven back to their real life with the priest above Deadwood—or maybe they are just sleepy, unused to being rousted from their beauty sleep once the sun goes down—and perhaps they are also pleased at all the heaps of straw and bales of hay strategically placed in the back of the slat-sided truck for their riding and dining pleasure.

Paha Sapa doesn’t break it to the donkeys that the hay and straw are for the dynamite to come later.

The highway is empty. The small complex of shacks and larger buildings visible on Doane Mountain through the pines—the hoist house, blacksmith shop, compressor house—are all dark. Paha Sapa catches a glimpse of lights still gleaming from Mr. Borglum’s studio, but that home is safely away from the large dirt-and-gravel parking lot where he drives the Dodge to the far end, parks in the shadows of large trees, and unloads Devil’s and Advocate.

The trees now have shadows because the moon—two days away from being full—has risen above the peaks and hills to the east. The August night air is warmer than usual for this altitude and hour and the dried grasses underfoot are alive with leaping ’hoppers and other insects as Paha Sapa leads the confused donkeys thirty yards from the parking lot. The actual steep path to the Hall of Records canyon begins another hundred and fifty yards or so up the hill, but Paha Sapa is going to have to leave the donkeys here and he wants them to be quiet while he goes back for the dynamite. To that end, he not only ties them firmly to ponderosa pines with their tethers, but also hobbles them and ties on blindfolds.

Advocatus and Diaboli both kick out blindly in their irritation at this final insult to their dignity.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, thinks Paha Sapa as he hauls the two animal pack frames from the truck and cinches one onto each of the astonished animals. He also brings up the folded tarps and stacks them in the dappled moonlight.

All his life, Paha Sapa has loved the scent of pine needles underfoot at night, the aroma they release while cooling after a hot day in the sun, and this night is no different. He realizes that the pain that has been growing in his bowels and lower back the past weeks is dissipating, as is the terrible fatigue he’s carried with him day and night for months now.

This is it. I’m committed. I’m actually doing this at last.

There is a freedom—almost a lightness—in this thought, and he has to remind himself, sardonically, that all he’s done so far is transport two donkeys uphill for immoral purposes. There’s a Mann Act, Paha Sapa knows… is there a Donkey Act?

There will be if you don’t sober up, Black Hills, he snaps at himself. He knows that he has not touched a drop of whiskey or any other sort of liquor or wine or beer in more than forty years—so where is this almost drunken levity coming from?

From finally doing what you’ve only thought about doing for sixty years, you tiresome moron, he tells himself as he puts the Dodge in neutral and lets it coast out of the parking lot and downhill away from the monument before finally starting the engine.

The twenty-one crates of the best dynamite he has in storage have been set aside from the rejects and are ready to load. Paha Sapa’s back has been hurting so much recently that he worried about the simple act of loading the crates—afraid his back would give way hauling the heavy crates up the ramp to the truck bed—but he has no problems at all. Each of the crates fits perfectly into the high cradle of hay bales just as he planned, and the tarps and straw set between each crate in each stack further cushion them.

Still, he lets out a breath when he’s beyond the so-called city limits of Keystone. Because so many of the town’s residents work for Mr. Borglum, and because tomorrow—no, today now—this Saturday, is a workday for most of them, the three backroom bars in town aren’t as busy as they usually are on a Friday night, but Paha Sapa would still feel bad if a bump in this potholed, unpaved-to-begin-with road were to blow him, the truck, those bars, and twenty other structures with their cargo of sleeping wives and children to atoms.

If the nitro or dynamite goes now, he realizes as he crawls up the mountain road in low gear, it will be only him and a stretch of highway and a few dozen trees vaporized. But Paha Sapa frowns as he realizes that it’s been so terribly dry this entire summer that such a blast on this part of the road will almost certainly start a forest fire that could still destroy all of Keystone, and the Doane Mountain and Mount Rushmore structures as well.

The twenty-one crates of dynamite and single, smaller crate of detonators don’t blow during the bouncing, jolting ride up the hill.

Paha Sapa is amazed to discover not only that he expected them to, but—in some strange, inexplicable, sick way—he is a little disappointed that they haven’t.

Parked in moon shadows again, he unloads all twenty-one crates and the single, much smaller box of detonators. Then he drives the Dodge quietly out of the parking lot, pulls it into an abandoned fire road three-quarters of a mile down the hill, and walks back, cutting through the woods. The almost-full moon is above the closer hills and rocky ridgelines now and keeps tangling itself in pine branches above Paha Sapa before working itself free. Its brilliance blots out the stars as it climbs higher and makes the granite cliff face and shoulders of Mount Rushmore, glimpsed to his left through the tall trees, glow a purer white in the moonlight than they do in daylight. George Washington’s eyes, the oldest up there, present the perfect illusion of following Paha Sapa.

Before bringing the blindfolded and now silent donkeys back to the dynamite to load up, Paha Sapa lifts the box of detonators—supporting it against his chest with a leather strap he’s rigged—and carries it up the Hall of Records canyon first.

The moonlight high on the canyon walls here looks like bold-edged bands of white paint. The shadows are very black, though, and both the approaches to the canyon and the floor of the canyon itself are littered with tree roots and then loose stones and fissures. Paha Sapa wishes that Borglum had already built that broad curving staircase he was talking about earlier in the day—yesterday now. He tries to keep to the moonlit areas, but the shadows are broad enough and black enough that once in the canyon itself, occasionally he has to use the flashlight he brought.

Once, trusting to moonlight, Paha Sapa trips and starts to fall forward onto the slightly clanking box of detonators. He stops his fall with his right arm outthrust, finding a low boulder there in the darkness.

As he carefully straightens and moves forward more slowly, he can feel the blood from his scraped and gouged palm dripping down his fingers. He can only smile and shake his head.

The rectangular test bore for the Hall of Records is invisible in the ink-black shadows thrown down that wall, but Paha Sapa can see the end of the canyon wall ahead and knows when to stop. He uses the flashlight to find the opening and, crouching in it, moves forward slowly to the end of the blind shaft. He’ll be stacking the dynamite itself closer to the opening and wants to be sure that no misstep or dropped crate in the darkness could trigger these touchy detonators.

Walking back to the donkeys and waiting dynamite beyond the mouth of the narrow canyon, Paha Sapa resists the ridiculous urge to whistle. He takes a clean kerchief from his pocket, wipes the blood from his palm and fingers, and wonders at the strange sense of exhilaration rising in him.

Is this what it feels like to be a warrior going into battle?

—Did you ever want to be a warrior?

This was Robert asking his father an unexpected yet strangely overdue question. It was summer 1912, during their annual summer camping trip, and Robert was fourteen years old. They’d camped in the Black Hills many times before this, but this was the first time Paha Sapa had brought his son to the top of the Six Grandfathers. The two were sitting at the edge of the cliff, their legs dangling over, very close to where Paha Sapa had dug his Vision Pit thirty-six years earlier.

—What I mean is… weren’t most of the young men in your tribe expected to become warriors in those days, Father?

Paha Sapa smiled.

—Most. Not all. I’ve told you about the winkte. And the wičasa wakan.

—And you wanted to become a wičasa wakan, like your adoptive grandfather, Limps-a-Lot. But tell the truth, Father… weren’t you ever tempted to become a warrior like most of the other young men?

Paha Sapa thinks about the one silly raid on the Pawnee on which he’d been allowed to accompany the older boys—and where he hadn’t even been able to hold the horses and keep them silent well enough to avoid ridicule from the others, who themselves had retreated fast enough when they saw the size of the Pawnee camp of warriors—and then he thought about how he’d rushed into the huge fight at the Greasy Grass without bringing a weapon. He realized he hadn’t even wanted to hurt the wasichus then, on the day Long Hair and the others had attacked the huge village there, but had simply ridden with the other men and boys because he didn’t want to be left behind.

—Actually, Robert, I don’t think I ever did want to be a warrior. Not really. There must have been something lacking in me. Perhaps it was just a matter of canl pe.

Fourteen-year-old Robert shook his head.

—You were no canl waka, Father. You know as well as I that it’s never been a question of cowardice.

Paha Sapa looked at the few clouds moving across the sky. In 1903, after Big Bill Slovak died in the Holy Terror Mine, Paha Sapa had taken his five-year-old son away from Keystone and Deadwood and out onto the plains, where the two had camped for seven days at Matho Paha, Bear Butte. On the sixth day, Paha Sapa awoke to find his son gone. The wagon he’d brought was still hidden in the secret place below, the horses still tethered where he’d left them, but Robert was gone.

For three hours Paha Sapa had searched up and down and along all sides of the fourteen-hundred-foot-tall hill rising out of the prairie while filling his mind with images: rattlesnake, rock fall, the boy falling, strangers. Then, just as Paha Sapa had decided that he must ride one of the horses to the nearest town to get help with the search, little Robert had walked into camp. He was hungry and dirty, but otherwise fine. When Paha Sapa had demanded his son tell him where he’d gone, why he’d been hiding, Robert had said, “I found a cave, Father. I was talking to the man with white hair who lives in the cave. His first name is the same as mine.”

After breakfast, he’d asked Robert to show him the cave. Robert could not find it. When Paha Sapa asked Robert to tell him what the old man had talked to him about, the boy said only, “He said that what he told me and the dreams he showed me were our secret—only his and only mine. He said you would understand, Father.”

Robert never revealed what Robert Sweet Medicine had said to him that day in 1903, or what visions he had shared. But every summer since then, Paha Sapa and his son had gone camping for a week.

Robert was dangling his long legs over the edge of the Six Grandfathers and looking at his father when he said softly—

—Ate, khoyákiphela he?

Paha Sapa did not know how to answer. What did he fear, other than for his son’s life and well-being? What had he feared, other than for his wife’s life and happiness when she was ill or for his people’s future? And had that been fear or just… knowledge?

And perhaps he feared the violence of other men’s memories that lay in his mind and soul like dark nodes: Crazy Horse’s depressions and explosions into fury; even Long Hair’s memories of joyous murders in the low light of winter sunrise with the regimental band playing on the hill behind them.

Paha Sapa just shook his head that day, not knowing how to answer the question but knowing that his son was right—he, Paha Sapa, had never been a coward, not in the usual sense—but also knowing the depths of his own failure as a father, as a husband, as a Natural Free Human Being. Paha Sapa had thought, before this summer’s trip in 1912, that he might tell Robert some of the details of his hanblečeya on this mountain thirty-six years earlier—perhaps even specifics of the Vision the Grandfathers had given him—but he realized now that he would never do that. Beyond telling Robert that he’d gone on vision quest here, he mentioned nothing of the vision itself during this week of camping around the mountain and—interestingly—Robert did not ask.

Robert Slow Horse had inherited his mother’s light skin color, hazel eyes, thin physique, and even her long eyelashes. The lashes did not make Robert look effeminate. Perhaps unlike his father, Robert was a born warrior, but a quiet one. There was none of the Crazy Horse rage and bluster in him. He allowed the bigger, older boys at his boarding school in Denver to tease him about his name or about being a “half-breed” for a while, then warned them softly, and then—when the bullies inevitably continued bullying—Robert would knock them on their asses. And he continued knocking them on their asses until they altered their behavior.

At fourteen, Robert was already four inches taller than his father. Where the height came from, Paha Sapa did not know, for Rain had been small, as had her father, the missionary minister and theologian, who had moved away from the Pine Ridge Reservation the year after his daughter’s death in 1899 and died himself before the actual new century arrived in 1901. Perhaps, Paha Sapa thought, his own father, the teenager Short Elk, had been tall despite his name. (Even a short elk, Paha Sapa realized, was relatively tall.) He had never thought to ask Limps-a-Lot or Angry Badger or Three Buffalo Woman or any of the others around him how tall his young father had been before he’d staked himself down to die fighting Pawnee.

The Reverend de Plachette had moved to Wyoming to be near his friend William Cody for that final year of the minister’s life. Cody had started a town named after himself there and built some hotels in it for the tourists he was sure would come to the beautiful West by way of the newly opened Burlington rail line. Buffalo Bill had named one of the big hotels after his daughter Irma and a road he’d paid to have built running from the town of Cody up to Yellowstone Park the Cody Road. Another sign of the aging entrepreneur’s wealth was the giant TE Ranch he established along the South Fork of the Shoshone River there. Cody had driven all of his cattle from his previous properties in Nebraska and South Dakota to the ranch.

When Paha Sapa and little Robert first visited the failing Reverend de Plachette and prosperous Cody there at the ranch in early 1900, Buffalo Bill’s operation was running more than a thousand head of cattle on more than seven thousand acres of prime grazing land.

Buffalo Bill, his hair white but still long and goatee still in place, had always insisted that his former employee and the boy stay with him in the big house when Paha Sapa visited, and it was that second and final visit, just before Reverend de Plachette died on the day of the first snowfall in Cody in autumn of 1900, that Cody had watched the two-year-old boy playing with some of the servants’ kids.

—Your son’s smarter than you, Billy.

Paha Sapa had not taken this as an insult. He already knew how intelligent his little son was. He’d only nodded.

Buffalo Bill had laughed.

—Hell, my guess is that he’ll grow up smarter than me. Did you see how he took that empty lantern apart and then put it back together? Didn’t even break the glass. Little fellow can hardly toddle and he’s already an engineer. What do you plan to do for his education, Billy?

That was a good question. Rain had made Paha Sapa swear that Robert would go to good schools and then to a college or university somewhere in the East. Of course, she’d been sure that her father would be there to help—the old man had taught natural and revealed religion and rhetoric at both Yale and Harvard at different times—but she hadn’t counted on her father dying so soon after her own death. And she hadn’t counted on her father dying broke.

The schools near Keystone and Deadwood where Paha Sapa had just begun working in the mines after leaving Pine Ridge Reservation were terrible and didn’t usually take Indian children anyway. The one school on the Pine Ridge Reservation was worse. Paha Sapa was saving money, but he had no idea how to buy his son an education.

William Cody had patted him softly on the back as they watched the children play.

—Leave it to me, Billy. My sister lives in Denver and I know of some good boarding schools there. The one I’m thinking of takes in boys starting at the age of nine and educates them right up to college age. It can be expensive, but I’ll be more than happy to…

—I have the money, Mr. Cody. But I would appreciate you putting in a good word with the school. It’s not every school that takes in an Indian child.

Cody had looked at the four toddlers playing on the floor.

—Who the hell can tell Robert’s part Indian, Billy? I couldn’t and I’ve been around your people for more than thirty years.

—He’ll still have the last name Slow Horse.

William Cody had grunted.

—Well, maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is, Billy, and he won’t need a good boarding school. Or maybe other people will get smarter in the future. One way or the other, we can always hope.

ROBERT HADN’T DISAPPOINTED his father. The boy had essentially taught himself to read before he was four; he was reading every book Paha Sapa could find for him by the time he was five. Somehow he learned to speak Lakota as if he’d been raised by Angry Badger’s band, but he was also speaking Spanish by the time he was six (almost certainly because of the Mexican woman and her family and friends who watched him while Paha Sapa was working in the mine). By the time Robert did go to the boarding school in Denver in 1907—the trip to Denver from the Black Hills was daunting then, since there was no direct rail service, but Mr. Cody himself had driven them down the unpaved roads from Wyoming—the boy had already begun speaking and reading some German and French. He had no problem with his studies in Denver despite the fact that he’d rarely attended a real school in the Hills and that his father had been his tutor.

In truth, Robert and his father had been inseparable until that day in September ’07 when Paha Sapa had looked out the oval rear window of Mr. Cody’s automobile in Denver and seen his son standing with strangers in front of a red-brick building with green shutters; Robert seemed too shy or stunned or perhaps just too interested in the strange situation to think to wave good-bye. But Robert had written every week that year and in the years since—good, long, information-filled letters—and although Paha Sapa knew that Robert had been terribly homesick all of that first year (Paha Sapa had felt his son’s aching homesickness in his own guts and heart), the boy had never once mentioned it in the letters. By January of each year they would be talking about where they would go camping together that summer.

—Did you ever bring Mother here?

Paha Sapa blinked out of his reverie.

—To the Black Hills? Of course.

—No, I mean here. To the Six Grandfathers.

—Not quite. We came to the Hills when she was pregnant with you and we climbed there….

Paha Sapa pointed to a peak rising to the west and south.

Robert looked surprised, even shocked.

—Harney Peak? I’m surprised you took Mother there—or even set foot on it.

—Its wasichu name means nothing, Robert. At least to me. We could see the Six Grandfathers—and almost everything else—from up there. There was a dirt road that went close to the Harney Peak trailhead and none here to the Six Grandfathers. You saw how rough the ride in here still is.

Robert nodded, looking up at the distant summit and obviously trying to imagine his mother up there, looking in this direction.

—Why did you ask, Robert?

—Ah, well, I was thinking of all the places you’ve taken me around here on our summer camping trips since I was little—Bear Butte, Inyan Kara, Wind Cave, the Badlands, the Six Grandfathers…

Robert had used the Lakota words for these places, including Matho Paha, Washu Niya (“the Breathing Place,” for Wind Cave), Maka Sichu, and so forth. Their private conversations almost always slipped in and out of Lakota and English.

Paha Sapa smiled.

—And?

The smile Robert returned looked like Rain’s when she had been embarrassed.

—And, well, I just wondered if there were religious reasons for these visits as well as just great places to camp—or places important to your people.

Paha Sapa noticed the “your” rather than “our” but said nothing.

—Robert, when the whites summoned various Ikče Wičaśa and Sahiyela and other tribes’ chiefs and holy men and war leaders to Fort Laramie in 1868, to work out the boundaries of the Indian territories, the white soldiers and diplomats speaking for the distant Great White Father said their purpose in mapping our lands was “to know and protect your lands as well as ours,” and our chiefs and holy men and warriors looked at the maps and scratched their heads. The idea of putting a limit to one’s people’s territories had never occurred to the Natural Free Human Beings or to any of the other tribes represented there. How could you know what you might win in war the next spring or lose the next summer? How could you put a line showing your land in areas that really belonged to the buffalo or all the animals that lived in the Black Hills… or all the tribes that sheltered there, for that matter? But then our holy men began to make marks on the wasichus’ maps showing places that must belong to their tribes and people because they were so sacred to them—big loops around Matho Paha and Inyan Kara and Maka Sichu and Paha Sapa and Washu Niya and Šakpe Tunkašila, where we sit right now….

Robert was already grinning as Paha Sapa continued.

—The wasichus were a little shocked because between just the Cheyenne and the Natural Free Human Beings, we considered just about every damned rock and hill and tree and creek and river and mesa and piece of prairie sacred in one way or another.

Robert was laughing now—that free, easy, natural, always unforced laugh that sounded so much like Rain’s sweet laughter to Paha Sapa.

—I get it, Father. There’s no place you could take me in or around the Black Hills that wouldn’t be part of the Ikče Wičas´a’s faith. But, still, don’t you ever… worry… about me in terms of religion?

—You were baptized Christian by your grandfather, Robert.

Robert laughed again and touched his father’s bare forearm.

—Yes, and that certainly took, didn’t it? Actually, I don’t think I’ve written you about it, but I often do go to various churches in Denver… not just the required chapel at school, but with the other students and some of the instructors and their families on Sunday. I especially have enjoyed a Catholic church in downtown Denver, where I’ve attended Mass with Mr. Murcheson and his family—especially at Easter and other Catholic holy days. I like the ritual… the smell of incense… the use of Latin… the whole thing.

Wondering what his wife and Protestant missionary-theologian father-in-law would think of this, Paha Sapa said—

—Are you thinking of becoming a Catholic, Robert?

The boy laughed again, but softly this time. He looked back at the shadowing summit of Harney Peak.

—No. I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to believe the way I know you did… probably do… and perhaps the way Mother and Grandfather de Plachette did.

Paha Sapa was tempted to tell Robert of how his grandfather had seemed to lose his faith in that year and a half after his daughter had died young. The danger, Paha Sapa knows too well, of having only one child… one child who becomes a human being’s only connection to the unseen future and, oddly but truly, to the forgotten past.

Robert is still speaking.

—… at least no religion I’ve encountered yet, but I look forward to seeing and learning more in different places. But I guess for right now, the only religion I can lay claim to is… Father, have you heard of a man named Albert Einstein?

—No.

—Not too many people have yet, but I suspect they will. Mr. Mülich, my mathematics and physics instructor at the school, showed me a paper that Professor Einstein published about three years ago, “Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung,” and the implications of that paper, according to Mr. Mülich—the idea that light has momentum and can act like point-particles, photons, well… that’s probably as close as I get to religion these days.

Paha Sapa looked at his son at that moment the way one looks at a photograph or drawing of a distant, distant relative.

Robert shook his head and laughed again, as if erasing a blackboard.

—But you know what the Catholic and Methodist and Presbyterian churches I’ve attended most reminded me of, Father?

—I have no idea.

—The Paiute Ghost Dance holy man you told me about a long time ago—Wovoka?

—Yes, that was his name.

—Well, his message of a messiah coming… him, I guess… and nonviolence and of how obeying his teachings would lead to the dead loved ones and ancestors returning to the world and the buffalo returning and how the Ghost Dance would induce a cataclysm that would carry away all the whites and other nonbelievers, sort of like the Tribulations and all that stuff in the Book of Revelation, sounded very Christian to me.

—That’s what a lot of us thought when we heard it, Robert.

—You told me about you and Limps-a-Lot planning to hear the Prophet with Sitting Bull up at Standing Rock Agency, but Sitting Bull getting killed when he resisted arrest…

—Yes.

—But you never told me about Limps-a-Lot. Only that he died shortly after that.

—There wasn’t much more to tell. Limps-a-Lot did die shortly after Sitting Bull was shot.

—But how? I mean… I know you’d thought that your honorary tunkašila had been killed years earlier, right after you’d had your Vision and the cavalry chasing Custer’s killers had burned your old village down, but you left that school the priests were running and went up to Canada to search for Limps-a-Lot when you were… gosh, you were about my age, Father.

Paha Sapa shook his head.

—Nonsense. I was much older… almost sixteen. A visiting priest from Canada had described a man who sounded like my tunkaˇsila. I had to go see.

—But still… my gosh, Father… just you riding all the way to Canada to find one man up there—and in the winter, I think you said. When you were fifteen years old. How’d you do it?

—I had a pistol.

Robert laughed so hard then that Paha Sapa actually worried the boy was going to fall off the cliff edge.

—That heavy Army Colt that you still own? I’ve seen that. What’d you kill for food with that monstrous thing? Buffalo? Antelope? Mountain lions?

—Rabbits, mostly.

—And you found Limps-a-Lot. After all that time?

—It wasn’t so long, Robert. Less than five years after Pehin Hanska Kasata—the summer we rubbed out Long Hair at the Greasy Grass…

Paha Sapa paused then and rubbed his temples as if he had a headache.

—You all right, Father?

—Fine. Anyway, it wasn’t so hard to find my tunkašila once I got up to Grandmother’s Country. The red-coated police told me where he was and said that I should leave and take him home with me.

—How had Limps-a-Lot survived the attack that killed his wives and almost everyone else in your village?

—He stepped outside his tipi when the detachment of Cook’s cavalry swept in at dawn and a bullet grazed him right here….

Paha Sapa touched his forehead and felt his own scar there, the one imparted by the stock of the old Crow scout Curly’s rifle. He paused a second, his finger remaining on the raised white welt that had been with him for thirty-six years. It was the first time he’d ever considered the fact that he and Limps-a-Lot had carried almost identical scars.

—Anyway, Limps-a-Lot was unconscious in the confusion, lying under the charging horses’ hooves, but two young nephews carried him from the battlefield, hid him in the willows, carried him out when the smoke from the burning tipis and bodies concealed their retreat. When my tunkašila awoke two days later, his old life and friends and wives and home—Angry Badger’s tiyospaye—were all gone forever, and he was on a travois and heading north to join Sitting Bull’s band in Grandmother’s Country.

—But Sitting Bull came back from Canada before he did.

—Yes. Limps-a-Lot had been ill with pneumonia when Sitting Bull took almost the last two hundred or so of his followers south—the rest had abandoned him, one family at a time, until his tiyospaye was a shadow of its former strength of eight hundred lodges—so I found Limps-a-Lot still ill up there in a village with only eight or ten dilapidated lodges and no food, my tunkašila living with only a couple of dozen old men and women too frightened to come back and too lazy or indifferent to take care of him in his illness.

—That was… what? Eighteen eighty-two?

—Eighteen eighty-one.

—So you brought him back, but not straight to the Standing Rock Agency.

—No, he went there later to be with Sitting Bull. First he rested and tried to recover while living with me near the Pine Ridge Agency. But he never fully recovered. And the pneumonia was not, I think, pneumonia—it never left him. I’m almost certain it was tuberculosis.

When Paha Sapa had started this story about his beloved grandfather, he’d slipped into full Lakota. Somehow, the discussion of Limps-a-Lot’s final days required this, he thought, but he also knew it would be difficult for Robert to follow fully. As good at languages as his son was, Paha Sapa knew that Robert’s only chance to practice Lakota was during his few summer weeks with his father and whenever they visited one of the reservations. This was a language, so beautiful and natural to Paha Sapa, in which a simple “thank you”—pilamayaye—translated literally to something like “feel good-me-you-made,” and a request for directions to a specific house would receive a reply such as Chanku kin le ogna waziyatakiya ni na chanku okiz’u icininpa kin hetan wiyoĥpeyatakiya ni, nahan tipi tokaheya kin hel ti. Nayašna oyakihi šni—which Robert would have to work out as “Road this along northward you-go and cross-road second from-that westward you-go and house first there he-lives. You-miss you-can not.” Statements involving technology became even more difficult for a nonnative Lakota speaker, so that merely asking the time became Mazaškanškan tonakca hwo? or “Metal-goes-goes what?” Most of all, it was a language in which everything had a spirit and volition, so that instead of saying, “It is going to storm”—a passive form that did not exist in Lakota at any rate—one said—“The Thunder Beings soon arriving-will-be.” In their wonderful four years of marriage, Rain—who was sublimely intelligent and had the advantage of being with many native speakers of Lakota—never really mastered the language and often had to ask Paha Sapa what someone from the reservation had said after a rapid-fire exchange of pleasantries.

But Limps-a-Lot’s spirit deserved having his final story told in Lakota, so Paha Sapa spoke slowly and in short sentences, pausing from time to time to make sure his son was following along.

—Limps-a-Lot did not like the Standing Rock Agency, but he liked living near his good friend Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull was killed just before the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns began—that is on December 17, and Sitting Bull died on December 15, 1890, wasichu time, my son—I believe it was only the widespread belief in the Paiute Prophet Wovoka’s Ghost Dance that kept the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock from slaughtering all the wasichu and the tribal police as well.

Robert was frowning to concentrate as he held up his hand almost shyly to signify a request for interruption. Paha Sapa paused.

—Atewaye ki, émičiktunža yo—My father, excuse me, but is this because the Paiute Prophet Wovoka taught no-violence like the true-Christians?

—Partially, my son, because Wovoka’s message, sacred to the Ghost Dancers, was “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.” But mostly it was because the majority of the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock—especially the Hunkpapas, who had been listening to the Ghost Dancers the longest—believed in the Ghost Dancer’s prophecy that come that spring of 1891 and the greening of the grass, all the wasichus were going to disappear and the tall grass and the buffalos and their dead relatives would return. Most of the Hunkpapas had done their Ghost Dancing faithfully and well, dancing and chanting until they fainted. Many had their magical shirts to protect them from bullets. They believed in the prophecy. Can you understand me at this speed?

—Yes, my father. I will not interrupt again unless I do not understand. Please continue.

—After Sitting Bull was killed, the Hunkpapas had no leader. Most of them fled Standing Rock Agency. Some left for one of the Ghost Dance hiding places. Many went to be with the last of their great chiefs, Red Cloud, at Pine Ridge, where I lived at the time. I was going back to Pine Ridge, but Limps-a-Lot did not go with me. He and Sitting Bull had become good friends with the old leader of Minneconjous, Big Foot. This leader was also suffering from pneumonia that winter—or perhaps it was tuberculosis, the same as Limps-a-Lot had, since they were both coughing blood by then—and Big Foot was sure that the Wasicun generals were planning to arrest him, just as they had Sitting Bull. Big Foot was correct. The order for his arrest had been sent out already. Can you still understand me, my son?

—Yes, Father. I am listening with all of my heart.

Paha Sapa nodded. He took a drink and passed the canteen to Robert, who also drank. High above them, a red-tailed hawk circled on a thermal. For one of the few times in his life, Paha Sapa did not wonder what the bird was seeing from that altitude—his thoughts were purely on Limps-a-Lot’s ending-story and on how to tell it well but simply.

—Washtay. I should have stayed with my tunkašila, but he did not want to go back to Pine Ridge with me at the time. He only wanted to join Big Foot’s band of Minneconjous where they were spending the winter—it was a cold, snowy winter, Robert—at their camp at Cherry Creek, not too far from Standing Rock. I escorted Limps-a-Lot, who was coughing very badly again, to Big Foot’s camp and then I left him, sure that his old friend would watch over him. About a hundred other Hunkpapas had also come to join Big Foot. I thought the camp was safe and promised to come back to check on Limps-a-Lot in a month, with the thought that I would then insist that my tunkašila join me at Pine Ridge for the spring. I should have stayed with him.

I was not gone a day when Big Foot, certain that the soldiers and tribal police would be coming for him, told his people and the Hunkpapa refugees to break camp—he had decided to lead them all to Pine Ridge after all, hoping that Red Cloud, who was friendly with the Fat Takers, would protect them all.

Soon, Big Foot was so ill and hemorrhaging so badly that he had to travel on blankets laid out in the back of a wagon. Limps-a-Lot, who was also coughing blood again, rode in the wagon as well, but alongside the young man Afraid-of-the- Enemy, who was driving the wagon. On December 28, as the long line of men, old men, women—mostly old women—and a few children were approaching Porcupine Creek, they saw four troops of the Seventh Cavalry approaching.

Paha Sapa paused, half expecting to hear words from the ghost hiding in his head. None came. Nor did Robert say anything, although at the words “Seventh Cavalry,” the fourteen-year-old boy had sighed like an old man. He knew something of his father’s experiences with the cavalry.

—Big Foot had a white flag raised over his wagon. When the cavalry major rode up to talk—the wasichu was named Whitside—Big Foot had to free himself from his blankets encrusted with frozen blood from his own bloody coughing. Limps-a-Lot and Afraid-of-the-Enemy and others helped the old Minneconjou stand and limp toward Major Whitside on his horse.

Whitside told Big Foot that he, the major, had orders to escort Big Foot and his people to a camp the cavalry had set up on the creek called Chankpe Opi Wakpala. Big Foot and Limps-a-Lot and the others were sorry that they would not see Red Cloud and be under his protection at Pine Ridge, but they thought that going to Chankpe Opi Wakpala was a good omen. Have I told you the importance of that place, Robert?

—I do not believe so, my father.

—You remember the story I told you years ago of how the war chief Crazy Horse died at Fort Robinson?

—Yes.

—Well, when Crazy Horse was killed there, a few of his friends and relatives took his body away. They would tell no one exactly where they had buried Crazy Horse’s heart, only that it was somewhere along Chankpe Opi Wakpala.

—So that creek was sacred?

—It was… important. Big Foot, Limps-a-Lot, and most of the others thought that Crazy Horse had been our people’s bravest leader. It seemed a good sign that they were going to the place where Crazy Horse’s spirit might watch over them.

—Please go on with the story, Father.

—We learned afterward, mostly from their half-breed scout that day, John Shangreau, that Major Whitside’s orders had been to… Did I say something amusing, Robert? You’re smiling.

—I’m sorry, Father. It is just that when a boy or man in Denver says that word, I have to knock him down.

Paha Sapa rubbed the scar on his forehead. He was not wearing a hat that hot July day and the sun was making him a little dizzy. When the story was finished, he would suggest that they go in under the shade of the trees and down the hill to the campsite to begin preparing dinner.

—Says what word, Robert?

—WaśicuNeiNea. Half-breed.

—Oh. Well, you’re not a half-breed in any case. Your mother was half white. You’re a… quarter-breed, at most.

Mathematics had never been Paha Sapa’s strong suit and fractions had always annoyed him. Racial fractions annoyed him more than most.

—Please continue, my father. I shall not smile again.

—Where was I? Oh, yes… the scout John Shangreau knew that Major Whitside’s orders were to capture and disarm and dismount all of Big Foot’s band. But Shangreau convinced the major that any attempt right then to take the men’s guns and horses away would almost surely start a fight. So Whitside decided to do nothing until Big Foot’s band was at Chankpe Opi Wakpala and where the cavalry could deploy the Hotchkiss guns they had in the rear of their column. What is it? You’re frowning.

—I don’t want to interrupt again, but I have no idea what Hotchkiss guns are… or were.

—I saw them when I rode with the Third Cavalry in 1877… rode as the worst scout in Army history. I led them to nothing. The new Hotchkiss guns used to be brought along behind the main detachment, pulled by mules or horses. They were like the Gatling guns used in the Civil War, only faster, deadlier—they were a sort of Gatling gun cannon. The revolving Hotchkiss cannon had five thirty-seven-millimeter barrels and was capable of firing forty-three rounds per minute with accuracy out to, I remember, a range of about two thousand yards. Each feed magazine held ten rounds and weighed about ten pounds. I remember the weight because when I was twelve and thirteen summers old, I had to carry and lift and load the damned things onto the supply wagons. Each wagon carried hundreds of magazines, tens of thousands of thirty-seven-millimeter rounds.

—Jesus Christ.

Robert had whispered those two words. Paha Sapa knew that the boy’s mother and grandfather would have been upset at the casual blasphemy, but it meant nothing to Paha Sapa.

—You can guess the rest of the story, my son. They reached the army tent camp at Chankpe Opi Wakpala—it was very cold, as I said, and the stream was frozen, the willows and cottonwood trees along it all outlined in frost. The frozen grass stood up like daggers and cut into moccasins. There were a hundred and twenty men, including Limps-a-Lot, in Big Foot’s band and about two hundred and thirty women and children. But I didn’t mean to give the impression that all the men were feeble old men—a lot of the warriors there were still warriors and had been at the Greasy Grass and part of the rubbing out of Long Hair. As these men looked at the cavalry and infantry drawn up the next morning, the Hotchkiss guns aimed down at them from the hilltop, they must have wondered if the Seventh Cavalry had revenge on its mind and in its heart.

Robert opened his mouth as if ready to ask or say something, but in the end did not speak.

—As I say, you can guess the rest, Robert. It seemed that the wasichu leaders—the rest of the regiment had arrived that first night at the Chankpe Opi Wakpala and a Colonel Forsyth had taken command—were being helpful. They’d brought Big Foot to this place in the regiment’s ambulance and provided a tent that was supposed to be warmer than the tipis for the old chief to sleep in. Limps-a-Lot slept in a tipi nearby because he did not want to spend the night in a Seventh Cavalry tent. Major Whitside’s own surgeon had looked at Big Foot, but there was nothing to be done for what they thought was pneumonia then—even less for consumption. Limps-a-Lot, friends later told me, was also coughing more there at that cold, windy place.

In the morning, the bugle blew and Big Foot was helped out of his tent and the soldiers began the disarming. The warriors and old men handed over their rifles and old pistols. Not satisfied, the soldiers went into the tipis and threw axes and knives and even tent stakes onto the big pile in the center of the circle of disarmed men.

Most of the Hunkpapas and Minneconjous wore their inpenetrable Ghost Shirts that day, but not in anticipation of a fight. They’d given up their guns.

But there is always one who won’t. In this case, I was told, it was a very young Minneconjou named Black Coyote. Some told me that Black Coyote was deaf and couldn’t hear the commands from the soldiers and his own chiefs to put his rifle down. Others said that Black Coyote could hear all right, but that he was a stupid pain in the ass and a show-off. At any rate, Black Coyote danced around with his rifle held out, not aiming it but not putting it down with the other weapons. Then the soldiers grabbed him and spun him around and there was a shot—some thought it came from Black Coyote’s rifle; others told me it hadn’t. But it was enough.

You can imagine what happened next, Robert, on that sunny, very cold day near the end of the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns. Many of the warriors snatched up their rifles and tried to fight. Eventually the Hotchkiss guns began firing down into them. When it was over, more than half of Big Foot’s people were dead or very seriously wounded… a hundred and fifty-three were dead on the snowy battlefield. More crawled away to die in the bushes or stream. Louise Weasel Bear, who told me the story, said that almost three hundred of the original three hundred and fifty men, women, and children who’d followed Big Foot there died at Chankpe Opi Wakpala. I remember that something like twenty-five wasichu soldiers died that day. I don’t know how many were wounded, but not that many more. The young woman Hakiktawin told me that most of the Seventh Cavalry soldiers had been shot by their own men or hit by shrapnel from rounds from the Hotchkiss guns striking rock or bone. I’ve always preferred to think that this is not the truth—that the warriors and old men and women who died there that day did fire back with some effect.

I was not quite to Pine Ridge when I heard and I turned around and hurried to Chankpe Opi Wakpala. Limps-a-Lot had taken me to that place many times when I was a boy, simply because it was beautiful and had many legends and stories about it.

There was a blizzard. My horse died, but I kept walking, then stole another horse from a cavalry detachment I came across in the storm. When I arrived at Chankpe Opi Wakpala I saw that the Seventh had left the Indian dead and severely wounded behind, and now the bodies were frozen in strange postures and covered with snow from the storm. I found Big Foot first—his right arm and right leg were bent as if he were pushing himself up to a sitting position, his back was off the ground, the fingers of his left hand were raised and frozen as if in the act of opening, with only the little finger curled shut—and he was wearing a woman’s scarf around his head. His left eye was closed but his right eye was open—the crows and magpies had not taken his eyes yet, probably because they were frozen as hard as marbles—and there was snow on his open eye.

Limps-a-Lot was lying no more than thirty feet from Big Foot. Something, probably a thirty-seven-millimeter round from one of the Hotchkiss guns, had taken his right arm off, but I found it lying nearby in the snow, rising almost vertically from a snowdrift, as if my tunkašila were waving at me. His mouth was wide open as if he had died screaming—but I prefer to think that he was singing his Death Song loudly. Either way, his gaping mouth had filled with snow until the snow overflowed, running out in all directions like some pure, white vomit of death, filling his eye sockets and outlining his sharp cheekbones.

I knew the wasichu cavalry would be back, probably that same day, to take photographs and to bury the dead there, probably in a single mass grave, and I could not leave Limps-a-Lot’s body there for that. But I had no shovel with me, not even a knife, and my tunkašila’s body was frozen to the cold earth. They were as one. Nothing bent—not his arm, not his twisted legs, not even the separate arm rising from the snowdrift. Even his left ear was one with the frozen earth. With only my cold, bare hands, it was like trying to lift a rooted tree out of the ground.

Eventually I sat down, panting, freezing, my hands numb, knowing that the cavalry detachment would be there soon and that they would take me prisoner as well—the word I’d heard was that the few Hunkpapa and Minneconjou survivors were being sent to a prison in Omaha, where they had planned to send Big Foot and all his men—and I began walking that murder field, I refuse to this day to call it a battlefield, until I found a woman’s corpse with a dull, flat-bladed cooking knife in her clenched hand. I had to snap all her fingers like twigs to get the knife free. With that knife to chip away at the ice between Limps-a-Lot’s frozen coat and frozen flesh and the frozen soil, I freed his body from the earth’s grip in less than half an hour. I brought the severed arm with the white bone protruding as well. I propped Limps-a-Lot’s body on the saddlehorn in front of me—it was like carrying a long and twisted and unwieldy, but almost weightless, cottonwood branch—and I lashed his right arm across his chest with long strips of cloth torn from my shirt.

With only that dull knife, I could not bury Limps-a-Lot in the frozen soil that day, but I took him far away from what I thought of that day as that evil field and buried him miles and miles away along the Chankpe Opi Wakpala where it undercut a tall bluff and where larger, older cottonwoods—the kind of beautiful waga chun, “rustling tree,” of the kind Limps-a-Lot or Sitting Bull would have chosen to stand in the center of the dancing circle—and there I made the best burial scaffold I could for my tunkašila up there in the branches of one of those rustling-tree perfect cottonwoods.

But I had no robes to lay under him or to cover him with, no real weapons or tools to leave by his side. I did leave the dull knife after using it to hack off all my hair, and it was covered with my frozen blood as well as some from Limps-a-Lot. I kissed both of his hands—lifting the severed right arm toward my lips—and kissed his cold-stone of a furrowed forehead and whispered good-bye and rode the stolen cavalry horse almost all the way back to Pine Ridge before dismounting, swatting the exhausted beast on the rump, and walking the rest of the way home. It had been three days since I had eaten anything and I lost two toes on my left foot to frostbite.

The other fallen, I learned, were buried in a mass grave that very afternoon. No one knows where I left Limps-a-Lot’s body and I have never returned to the secret spot.

That is all, Robert. Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin.

So be it. All my relatives—every one of us. I have spoken.

IT TAKES PAHA SAPA six trips back and forth with the donkeys before he gets all twenty-one crates of dynamite hidden in the Hall of Records test bore tunnel. He could have made it in five trips if he’d thought the diminutive donkeys could handle more than two crates lashed onto their pack frames at a time, but he was conservative there, and the final trip back up the canyon, a tether in each hand, is made with one donkey carrying the last crate of dynamite and the other carrying only the hundreds of feet of coiled detonation wire and other incidental things Paha Sapa will need on Sunday. He has painted the black wire a granite gray.

The night has not been hard work for Paha Sapa, at least after Advocatus and Diaboli realized—somewhere around the beginning of the third trip uphill to the canyon—that they were, at least for this one night, beasts of burden again rather than coddled priest’s pets.

When he stacks the last crate inside the tunnel and covers it with the last tarp—the gray-white canvas almost indistinguishable from the granite in the quickly disappearing moonlight—one of the donkeys sneezes and Paha Sapa allows this to substitute for his own tired sigh.

Walking back down the narrow canyon, he realizes that as the moon has moved to the west, shining now through the trees on the high ridge wall to the west of the canyon, all of the ink-black shadows from his early trips are now bright stripes and trapezoids of milk-white moonlight, and all of the formerly safe areas to step are now treacherous shadows. It does not matter. He has every step of the way memorized after his seven trips up (including the first one on foot carrying the box of detonators) and seven trips back.

Remembering the long telling of Limps-a-Lot’s final story to Robert, Paha Sapa is reminded of that same long-ago time in 1890 at Chankpe Opi Wakpala. While searching the faces of the frozen, snow-covered forms in that field for Limps-a-Lot’s corpse, he had, for the first time, reached into the black place where Long Hair’s ghost had resided those fourteen years, babbling away in English about his pornographic memories of his wife, and dragged that ghost kicking and screaming to a place behind his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, forcing it to watch and to look and to see, forbidding it with his own Voice of God to say nothing.

After Limps-a-Lot’s burial, Paha Sapa threw Long Hair’s ghost back into the silent, lightless place where it had resided until then. He did not speak to it again (or allow it to speak to him) for another eleven months, but the oft-interrupted conversation began that day. Custer’s ghost was later to tell Paha Sapa that he, Custer’s ghost, was certain that he’d arrived in Hell and that his punishment would be to look at such sights as the field at Chankpe Opi Wakpala for all the rest of eternity. Paha Sapa immediately reminded Long Hair’s ghost that the snowy field and the frozen dead men, women, and children could just as easily have been at Washita.

It was another year before he and the ghost spoke again.

The ghost has said nothing this night. Of course, he has not spoken at all in the past three and a half years, not since the trip to New York in the spring of 1933.

Paha Sapa skirts the parking lot and cuts downhill through the woods to where he has hidden the Dodge truck. Advocatus and Diaboli seem almost too weary to climb the ramp up into the truck and then are too weary even to chew on the straw.

The moon has disappeared to the west; the eastern sky is already growing light. Paha Sapa checks his old watch. Almost five a.m. He has time to drive back to Keystone, load Robert’s motorcycle into the back of the truck with the donkeys—there was room to load it with the dynamite crates earlier, but Paha Sapa was stupidly sentimental about not blowing up his son’s machine if the nitroglycerine detonated—and then make the trip to Deadwood to return the two tired beasts to Father Pierre Marie and the Dodge truck to Howdy Peterson’s cousin. He’d come home on the motorcycle and have time to make some breakfast for himself before coming up the hill again to start a long Saturday of work supervising the drilling of the face in preparation for tomorrow’s—Sunday’s—demonstration explosion for the president, honored guests, and newsreel cameras.

Paha Sapa is so exhausted that far more than the cancer hurts him this beautiful but hot morning. Everything hurts, down to the marrow of his bones. He knows that this night, Saturday night to Sunday morning, even with the moron Mune’s help, he will have much more hard labor to do through the night than merely walking donkeys up a hill and canyon a few times and transferring twenty-one relatively light crates of dynamite. And he will have to start earlier to have any chance of finishing the placement of the charges and wires before sunrise, and this on a Saturday night, when everyone stays awake partying until late.

Driving the heavy Dodge truck down the bumpy road toward Keystone, flinching for no reason every time the wheels hit a deep pothole, he tries to think of a prayer asking Wakan Tanka or the Six Forces of the Universe or the Mystery itself for strength, but he cannot remember the words for any such prayer.

Instead, he remembers a Grandfather Chant that Limps-a-Lot taught him when he was very little and he sings it now—

Then he comes out of the forest just as the sun rises over the hills to the east, temporarily blinding Paha Sapa—who has to fumble in the tangle of junk in the lidless glove compartment to find his sunglasses—and he remembers and sings a song that the Sun himself taught his people—