Black Hills

Chapter 25

HE HEARS THE RAVEN WINGS FLAPPING AND FEELS THE TALONED impact as one raven snatches up his nagi spirit-self and bears it and what is left of him aloft, away from the high-grassed earth.

The spirit of Paha Sapa’s first reaction is anger. He realizes that he has come to not believe in any continued existence after death, and now that that existence is proven to him—as the raven rises higher with its mate beside it and Paha Sapi’s nagi in its talons, flying toward the clouds and sky and Milky Way where Paha Sapa’s spirit will have to walk forevermore—he realizes that he doesn’t want to walk, even reunited with his ancestors, in the Milky Way. He wants to stay on the high-grassed Earth and talk to this woman who says she is his daughter-in-law, his lost son’s wife, and with the young woman who looks so much like his darling Rain that seeing her made his heart hurt so much it felt as if he’d been pierced by a barbed war arrow.

Paha Sapa suddenly realizes that he can see, but not through his own eyes. He is being carried by the raven and he is the raven.

It is a new and frightening experience. Paha Sapa has flown by magic before, but it has always been a lifting-up sort of flight—rising like a balloon as a boy with arms spread wide, being lifted in one of the Six Grandfathers’ giant palms, floating upward in the magical car of Mr. Ferris’s fine Wheel—and this flapping, hurtling, forward-motion-through-the-air sort of flying is breathtaking.

The raven glances below and Paha Sapa sees the battlefield falling far behind and farther below. The white Pierce-Arrow looks as tiny as a white bone lying in the grass.

He would like to have looked at that 1928 Pierce-Arrow closely, perhaps taken a ride in it. Even while flying to the afterlife in the sky, Paha Sapa thinks that his Belgian daughter-in-law’s family must be very rich to afford such a fine car.

The raven looks to its left and Paha Sapa sees the other raven flying there, its feathers so black they seem to drink the sunlight, its pinion muscles working easily. The other raven’s eye looks nothing like a human being’s eye: it is perfectly round, surrounded by small white beads of muscle that look to Paha Sapa like the sintkala waksus sacred streambed stones he sought out for his sweat lodge ceremony during his hanblečeya, and the round raven eye is an inhuman amber in color, a predator’s color, more like a wolf’s eye than a man’s. But behind that unfeeling raven’s eye, Paha Sapa catches just a second’s glimpse of the dancing blue of Long Hair’s bright eyes—the same blue eyes the young Paha Sapa looked into sixty years ago at the second of Custer’s death. So Long Hair’s nagi spirit-self is also being borne aloft.

Paha Sapa wants to shout to the Custer-carrying raven—I told you you were a ghost!—but his spirit-self has no voice.

And yet the blue human eye behind the round raven eye seems to blink at Paha Sapa in a final, bemused farewell just before that raven breaks off in its flight and heads north while Paha Sapa’s continues east and a little south. Whatever Long Hair’s destiny is after being finally released to real death—and Paha Sapa can only hope that it includes Libbie—it lies elsewhere and Paha Sapa will never know it.

Paha Sapa’s raven climbs and climbs and climbs until the horizon curves downward at both ends and the blue sky here above the clouds becomes almost black. The stars are coming out.

But then the raven ceases climbing. They are not going to the Milky Way. Not yet.

The raven looks down and Paha Sapa is not surprised to see the Black Hills dark in its surrounding heart muscle of red-ringing rock, the tiny island in the endless ocean of autumn-brown grass. Wamakaognaka e’cantge—the heart of everything that is.

Suddenly he is surprised as the raven begins to descend.

He is surprised again to see that the great sea has suddenly surrounded the Black Hills again, obscuring all sight of the land beneath the waters. He wonders if he is about to be punished by having to view yet again the Vision of the Wasichu Stone Giants rising from the Black Hills and exterminating the buffalo and his people’s way of life.

No.

There are no voices in his head, no Six Grandfathers speaking to him this time, but he suddenly understands that the great waters he sees with Wakan Tanka’s bright beam of light shining on them are the tides of time.

The raven folds its wings and dives, becoming in the graceful awfulness of that ancient motion the ultimate predator swooping down on its not-yet-visible but already hapless, helpless, and infinitely hopeless victim, and then the diving raven, wings still folded back flat against its ebony body, crashes beak-first and unblinkingly into the tidewaters of time. The water is as cold as Hell.

IN AN INSTANT the waters are gone. The skies are blue and cloudless. The raven flies steady and even some thousand feet or so above the earth. But everything is… different.

Paha Sapa sees Matho Paha, Bear Butte, ahead to the left, but the butte itself looks different. It is, he remembers in his son’s high, happy voice, a lacolith: an intrusive body of igneous rock, uplifting earlier sedimentary layers that have largely eroded away. This intrusion is of magma forcing itself into cooler crustal rock during the Eocene period. Paha Sapa has no idea when the Eocene period was, but he clearly remembers Robert telling him that Bear Butte shares a similar geological history with the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and with the Black Hills themselves.

But now the butte rises in a changed landscape.

The nonvoice in his mind informs Paha Sapa that he is looking at his beloved Black Hills and Great Plains sometime between 11,000 and 13,000 years before Paha Sapa was born. It is late summer, early autumn, but the air is cooler, and as the raven descended, Paha Sapa sees total snow cover on the Grand Tetons and Rocky Mountains to the west. Those peaks are usually shed of all but the tiniest remnants of snow by the end of August or early September, but now they are a wall of white rising in the west.

Paha Sapa’s educated eye sees other things that are subtly wrong. There are too many trees on the plains and foothills and some of those trees are tall species of pines and firs that do not grow near Bear Butte.

The grasses on the prairie are taller and greener than any Paha Sapa has seen even in spring, much less near the end of summer. They have not been grazed down anywhere.

The raven passes over a river and Paha Sapa knows at once that there is too much water in the river for this time of year and that the water rushing there is a milky blue, filled with fine dusty particles carried from remnants of glaciers in the west and north.

Glaciers.

The raven flaps, moving at miraculous speed, swooping up, then down, and Paha Sapa’s spirit soars with it.

The animals!

On the plains, the buffalo graze by the million, but there are other grazers there as well, and not just antelope and deer. The bison themselves look larger, with longer horns, but moving in herds nearby are tiny rawhide-colored horses of a kind Paha Sapa has never seen. These are not a tended herd as in his boyhood days, not horses descended from those who escaped the Spaniards a century or two earlier, but smaller, wilder, strange-looking horses that belong to this place 11,000 to 13,000 years before his time.

Moving between herds of bison and smaller herds of the wild horses comes a line of elephants.

Elephants!

The raven gracefully circles only a few hundred feet above the family group of pachyderms. Not circus elephants—these are some sort of mammoth, although not as woolly as the one he saw pictures and bones of with Rain in a display at the Chicago World’s Fair. The mammoths’ ears seem small but the males’ tusks are long and curving. A baby elephant, no more than six feet tall at the shoulder—what does one call a baby elephant?—holds its mother’s tail as the giants pound gently across the springy turf. As the herd approaches the river, the lead male trumpets and somewhere in the pine forests on the other side of the river, another mammoth trumpets back.

And a lion coughs. Farther away, wolves howl.

If Paha Sapa had his body, he would cry now.

He sees a pride of lions, half hidden by low foliage, lazing near the river. They are just… lions… as one would see in the Denver Zoo, but also not like that at all. They are free, majestic, unagitated, in their own environment. A lioness is doing the work, stalking slowly toward small groups of antelope and horses drinking at the river’s edge.

A shadow passes over the raven—his raven—and the black bird banks away in some panic. The cause of the shadow is a huge bald eagle high above, circling to watch the lion cubs below. Paha Sapa wonders—Would an eagle, even one this size, be so brazen as to try to pluck even the smallest of lion cubs out from under the careful watch of its parents?

He’s lived long enough to know that anything that eats flesh will kill and eat anything else if it gets the chance. Sometimes, Paha Sapa knows, the killing, even among the mostly utilitarian birds and big animals, is more for the joy of killing than for the eating.

Paha Sapa glimpses other large animals he can’t even identify—something like a very-long-necked camel; then something else, broad-legged, long-necked, and small-headed and almost as large as a small bison, moving through the undergrowth toward the trees with the comical slowness of a sloth.

Paha Sapa wants to think he’s dreaming but knows too well that this is no dream. The camels, the sloths, herds of strange small horses, the lumbering mammoths, as well as the stalking lions and jaguars and oversized grizzlies, are all real in this world, whenever in the past this world is. It is a Vision but not a dream.

Perhaps spooked by the eagle’s presence, his raven flies south past Bear Butte to the Black Hills, climbing all the time. Mount Rushmore does not exist. The Six Grandfathers mountain is intact and untouched.

But before the raven left the prairie and plains and forest and river, Paha Sapa had caught a final glimpse of something strange—a small group of human beings approaching from the north. They were not Ikče Wičaˇˇsa or any other tribe or band he might recognize: their faces were hairy, they wore rude, thick animal skins, and they carried spears far cruder than anything the Plains Indians would make.

Were they his ancestors or his ancestors’ ancestors or just strangers? But he was sure that they were just arriving from the north after having wandered for many years across lands just revealed by retreating seas and glaciers.

And—of this he was certain without having any idea how he was certain—within a few generations of these hairy men’s arrival in this New World, all the large predators and most of the large prey he had just seen with such joy—the lions, the camels, the mammoth elephants, the giant sloth, and even the horses—would be hunted to extinction here and everywhere in North America.

For the first time in sixty years, Paha Sapa sees the truth behind the truth of the Wasichu Stone Giants Vision.

The Fat Takers, in their elimination of the bison, were just finishing a trend that Paha Sapa’s ancestors and their earlier cohorts had begun in earnest 10,000 years ago—wiping out all the large, great species that had evolved here on this continent.

The elders of the Ikče Wičaśa—turned into bowlegged cowboy imitators now in Paha Sapa’s day—may meet in solemn, play-pretend council and the arthritic old men may spend days in sweat lodges while preening in the old clothes and beads and feathers of their recent ancestors and flattering themselves that in their day they were spiritually superior, their tribes serving as protectors of the natural world, but… in truth… it was they and all those who came before them, their much-revered ancestors and these hairy strangers who may not have been ancestors at all, who wiped out forever these beautiful species of mammoth elephant and camel and lion and shrub ox and cheetah and jaguar and sloth and the giant bison that made today’s grown buffalo look like calves, not to mention the native species of small, hardy horses that had evolved and been wiped out here by man long before the Spanish brought over their European varieties.

The raven flies very high now, and Paha Sapa’s heart feels very low.

Beneath them, the sunlit ocean-sea tides of time have flowed in again, surrounding the Black Hills, then slowly ebbed away.

The raven dives again.

EVEN FROM A HEIGHT where the horizon begins to curve, Paha Sapa sees that he is descending into some near-future of his own era. He also knows (without knowing how he knows and without having anyone to ask) that it is still Saturday, the fifth of September—although in what year or century or millennium or epoch, he does not know.

In the Black Hills, the four heads of Mount Rushmore gleam like bald men’s scalps in the sunlight. Farther south there is another, whiter granite gleam, as if another mountaintop has been mutilated, but the raven does not bank that way, and Paha Sapa cannot see where the raven does not look.

Bear Butte is where it should be, although even from great altitude it is obvious that the majority of pine trees on its lower slopes and ridgelines have been burned away. This does not concern Paha Sapa; prairie fires have swept across Matho Paha in numbers known only to the All, if Mystery chooses to count such things.

But the wasichu cities and towns are much larger—Rapid City, Belle Fourche, Spearfish, even tiny Keystone in the Hills—and between the sprawling towns sunlight glints off windows on uncounted ranches, outbuildings, warehouses, and homes and new constructions.

The raven flies north just as it did a few minutes and 11,000 years earlier.

Paha Sapa sees that the Great Plains have been sliced into geometric parcels even more than in his lifetime. In this not-so-far-away future, at least one of the highways is a broad four lanes, two in each direction with a brown-grass median in between, similar in design to photographs he’s seen in newspapers of such a futuristic highway design in Germany that was first called the Kraftfahrtstraße in 1931 when the first four-lane section was completed between Cologne and Bonn but which Hitler is now—in Paha Sapa’s lifetime just ended—enthusiastically calling the Reichsautobahn, which Paha Sapa translated as something close to “Freeways of the Reich.” The German chancellor is putting his Depression-lashed men to work building more such autobahns all over Germany, and the New York Times has opined that not the least use of such a four-lane-highway system could be to move troops rapidly from border to border.

This new autobahn, stangely ringing the north part of the Black Hills within the very grooves of the ancient “Race Track” of Lakota lore, is filled with more automobile and truck traffic than Paha Sapa has ever seen or could have imagined. Even New York City in 1933 was not this insane with rushing vehicles. And the automobiles and trucks and indefinable shapes rushing east and west along the four long, curving lanes are painted a full spectrum of bright colors that catch the sunlight.

Having come of age in an America where railroads—the Iron Horse to Limps-a-Lot and the other Natural Free Human Beings a generation earlier than Paha Sapa’s—were invariably the fastest way to travel, Paha Sapa finds it hard to believe that these autobahns will soon bind America together. (Unless, Paha Sapa thinks with a stab of insight, there is soon to be another installment in the Great War not long after his death, with Germany winning this time and occupying the United States.)

But it’s not Germans who occupy the prairie beneath him, he acknowledges as his raven swoops lower, but cattle.

Cattle, those stupid, filthy things that evolved in Europe or Asia or somewhere and that are now filling the plains beyond any prairie’s capacity to provide for them. When Paha Sapa was working (badly, he knew, because he never learned to be a good cowboy) for rancher Donovan, he’d smile when he heard Donovan and the other old-timers in the area talking about the “grand old traditions” of ranching in the West. The oldest of those traditions were fifty to seventy-five years old.

But in this near-future, even if it’s only twenty or thirty or fifty years from this lovely early-September day in 1936 when Paha Sapa has died, he sees that the cattle have continued to do what cattle do: cropping the grass to its roots and overgrazing until the desert is returning to the North American plains; befouling with their excrement every stream and river they can reach while breaking down the streambeds and riverbeds with their odious weight; leaving their trails everywhere in the desertified dust that was once noble grasslands to the point that from the high altitude Paha Sapa’s raven flies, a water tank in a thousand empty acres of disappearing grass now looks like the hub of a wheel with a radius of five miles or more and tan-white spokes of cattle trails.

And to protect their sacred, stupid cattle, the wasichu ranchers (and their faithful Indian companions) have wiped out the few remaining predators—the last wolves, the last grizzly bears, the last mountain lions—and declared war on such other species as prairie dogs (the overriding myth is that cattle break their legs in the burrow holes) and even the lowly coyote. Paha Sapa imagines that he can see the sunlight glinting off the millions of brass cartridge casings ejected in the killing-on-sight of all these species whose crime was getting in the way of… cattle.

The air on this fifth day of September in its unnumbered future year is… very warm. It feels like late July or early August to Paha Sapa, embedded as he is in the raven’s exquisitely tuned senses. When they were high, he’d seen that there was no snow at all left on the summits of the Grand Tetons or the Rocky Mountains to the west and southwest, not even in that range that Paha Sapa visited as a boy which the Ute had alliterately named the Never No Summer Range.

There will be full, hot, snowless summer there now, even deep into autumn.

Swooping in a circle above the river, Paha Sapa can see that the partitioning of the plains does not stop with the new autobahn circling its four-lane-way north of the Black Hills from Rapid City or by the much busier (and paved!) web of state roads and county roads and fire roads and ranch driveways, or even with all the squares and rectangles and trapezoids of ranch land fenced off with barbed wire—and that is all the land as best he can see—but now the high- and green-grassed plains of his earlier vision and even of his childhood years have been carved into geometric shapes by the relentless overgrazing of the cattle.

On one side of the barbed-wire fences the raven swoops over, letting the wind carry it, the grass is low and unhealthy and missing its most beautiful varieties of botanic species, but on the other side of the wire, the more heavily grazed side, it is essentially dirt.

The hoofprints and cattle wallows and trails—bison never followed one another in single file, but stupid cattle invariably do—are bringing back the desert.

Paha Sapa once heard Doane Robinson talk to a group of physical scientists about the danger of desertification, but the threat seemed far away in the bring-in-more-cattle-and-people 1920s. Now he can see the results. Those parts of the Great Plains of the United States of America that didn’t blow away in the dust storms during the Great Depression have now been overgrazed, overtrod, overpaved, overpopulated, and overheated—for whatever reason the climate feels so warm—to the point that the deserts are returning. When his raven rises, Paha Sapa can see the once-blue river running brown with cattle shit and mud from its cattle- and erosion-collapsed bare banks.

The voice that is not his son’s but which sounds much like his son’s whispers to him without words.

In the old days, even in the thousands of years after the ancestors and others before the Ikče Wičaśa had wiped out all of the top predator and grazing species except for the bison, the great prairies of tall grass and short grass that spread from the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains stayed healthy due to the interaction of natural forces.

Bison, unlike cattle, stampeded and wandered great distances in a way that spread the grass seeds of the now-missing healthy tall grasses. Their hooves, so unlike cattle hooves, actually helped plant the seeds. The buffalo grazed the grass in a way that did not chew down to the roots and kill the plants as cattle do, and they never grazed in one place for a long period of time. Their manure enriched the grasses that gave cover and a home to a thousand species no longer present.

The grasslands needed fire to replenish themselves. Lightning provided that replenishment, with no men—Indian or Fat Takers—to stop those fires, but even after the Natural Free Human Beings spread across the plains, they had the habit of annually lighting prairie fires themselves.

So did the Assiniboin and the River Crow, the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone, the Blackfoot and Bloods and Plains Cree. So did the old, lost tribes whom first the Sioux and then the Fat Takers’ diseases had rubbed out—the Mandan and Hidatsa and Santee and Ponca and Oto and Arikara.

These peoples had burned the prairie regularly for their own reasons, sometimes for reasons lost to time, sometimes to flush game—and sometimes just for the fun of seeing the flame and destruction—but the fires had always helped to keep the varied prairie grasses and flowers and plants healthy and renewed.

All that is gone now, especially in this not-so-far future the raven is showing him.

All the thousands of interacting species here have now come down to two—man and his cattle. The Fat Takers and their fat, stupid meat beasts, both constantly bred for more fatness.

Oh, birds still migrate over and past this new world where the grasses no longer grow, but even the species of birds are disappearing faster than human beings can note their passing. The destruction of the wet places, the driving out of all variety among the grasses and four-legged beings of the prairie, and the draining and grazing and paving over of the birds’ mating places… yes, there are still species of birds to be found, but they tend to be of the thieving, scavenging, garbage-begging, back-alley species like magpies. They are the equivalent of the few remaining wild animals: scruffy coyotes eking out an existence on the edge of men’s and cattle’s dusty world, their sad countenances suggesting they know that the deserts are inexorably approaching.

His raven turns south and climbs for the sky again, and Paha Sapa hopes that it will not descend again. He welcomes death.

Let the time tides flow in and out as they always have; why must he—Paha Sapa—have to see the ravages of what men have done and will continue doing to the world and themselves?

He senses rather than sees that the time tides have, again and again, turned bloodred on both rims of the horizon as other Great Wars have raged. Perhaps men love their cattle so much, he thinks glumly, because men so much love slaughter in great numbers.

The raven has reached the icy upper air and it pauses there, hanging motionless on some unseen thermal. The stars are coming out in the darkened sky of day again, and the horizon has again bent itself like a warrior’s bow.

Paha Sapa, the cynic and unbeliever for so much of the last part of his now-departed life, manages the sincerest prayer he has ever prayed.

Please, O Wakan Tanka—my mediating Grandfathers—the All, the Mystery none of us will ever understand—O please, God, show me no more. I have died; please let me be dead. For my part in what you have shown me, I am heartily sorry. But punish me with no more Visions. My life has been saddened and stunted with Visions. Let me die and be dead, O Lord God of My Fathers.

Merciless, the raven swoops downward once again.

FOR A FEW MOMENTS there are no sounds or images, no motion or sensation, only knowledge.

His granddaughter, Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette, soon to become Mrs. Maurice Dunkleblum Ochs when her fiancée finishes up the closing-out of her grandfather’s business in Brussels and joins her in America, is pregnant.

This seventeen-year-old beauty who could have been his darling Rain’s twin, Flora is pregnant with Paha Sapa’s (and the absent Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler’s) great-grandson, who shall be named Robert. The happy couple will have four more children, all of whom will survive childbirth and childhood, but it is Robert’s soul whom Paha Sapa touched with his vision-forward ability when he took his granddaughter’s hand the second before his stroke. And it is Robert’s future that bore him forward into time as surely as these ebbing, flowing ocean tides of time below him now.

Born in 1937, Robert Adler Ochs will become both scientist and writer; his popularized science books and TV series will be enjoyed by millions of people. His specialty shall be physics, but as was true of his grandfather from America, the first Robert, this Robert will become an expert in other sciences such as geology and the environment and meteorology of Mars and of other planets. Robert Adler Ochs will be a guest in Mission Control in Houston in July of 1969 when men first walk on the moon, sitting with other scientists all acting like children released from school on a snow day.

Of Robert Ochs’s three children, his middle child—Constance (who will publish under her married name, C. H. O. Greene)—will most continue her father’s tradition of excellence in science and writing. Born in 1972, Constance Helene Ochs Greene will be a major researcher well into the middle of the 21st Century and beyond. Her trio of specialties—her broad interests so rare in the continued age of specialization in the sciences—will be climate change, genetics, and ethnology. Her book The World We Made, the New World We Can Make will sell more than twenty million download copies worldwide.

But in a changed world.

And that actual change in the real world is the goal behind Constance Greene’s three bestselling books and behind the more than two hundred papers she will publish in scientific journals during her lifetime. Her special interest… no, her passion, her dream, her mission, her goal, her reason for being… will be Pleistocene megafauna rewilding of the Great Plains of North America.

Even when she someday will be an honored and elder scientist leading an international effort that will see rewilding projects in more than thirty nations, it is always the Great Plains of North America that will continue to command the majority of her love and attention.

And there are enough details to command the attention of ten thousand Connies—ten thousand Constance Helene Ochs Greenes.

As the overgrazed and overburdened and variety-starved prairies are finally dying for good in the 21st Century, the ranches failing even after countless subsidies from the government and after a thousand attempts at “diversification” of what constitutes “ranching,” the deserts returning to where they have not been for hundreds of thousands of years, the small and midsized towns emptying out, the human population disappearing, the last dregs of economy in the region vanishing just as quickly, Dr. Constance Helene Ochs Greene will spend most of her long life being part of a solution that offers a new birth not only to many species of animal and plant life, but to entire groups of people as well.

Perhaps it is Connie Greene’s voice that Paha Sapa hears during this final descent of his nagi- carrying raven. Or perhaps it is again the soft voice of the oldest and wisest of the Six Grandfathers. Or perhaps it is Limps-a-Lot’s wise whisper or the soft voice of his most darling Rain.

More likely, it is all of their voices that Paha Sapa will hear next.

THE RAVEN SWOOPS LOW over the Black Hills. Borglum’s four Wasichu Stone Heads are there in place, looking slightly grayer with time. Either they have not turned into striding stone giants or the day of their striding and Taking of Fat has passed.

Even while the raven circles on high thermals, Paha Sapa can see that some eight miles to the west and south of Mount Rushmore there is another mountain turned to sculpture. This one is larger and newer, the granite more brightly white.

The voices of those he has loved and worshipped and will love in the future whisper in his ear.

This is Crazy Horse and his horse. Unlike Rushmore, where the heads are just part of the great rock mass, this entire mountain has been sculpted. The scale of blasting and sculpting is larger in every way.

After so many years in the mines and on mountaintops of making as precise measurements and estimates of measurements as humanly possible, especially of sculpted or soon-to-be-sculpted rock, Paha Sapa cannot help but make such estimates now.

The three presidents’ heads that Paha Sapa worked on were each about sixty feet high. Crazy Horse’s head in this new, giant sculpture looks to be almost ninety feet high.

But where the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were designed to be only heads with the occasional hint of shoulder—say the jacket lapels on Washington and the roughed-out knuckles of Lincoln holding a lapel (not yet started when Paha Sapa left forever)—here the entire upper body and both arms of Crazy Horse have been released from the mountain by explosives and then sculpted and bumpered down to smooth, white stone. And beneath Crazy Horse is his horse, the animal’s stylized, artistically maned head pulled down and turning back in dynamic motion, as if powerfully reined in, the horse’s left leg raised and bent and finely finished from its muscled chest to its fragile shank and hovering hoof.

Paha Sapa sees that Crazy Horse’s left arm is rigidly extended above the elaborately carved mane of the stallion and that the war leader is pointing with one finger.

The whole sculpture is 641 feet wide and 563 feet tall.

As the raven circles on the powerful thermals rising from the sun-heated stone—the air on this future fifth day of September is even hotter than in the previous vision-future—Paha Sapa can see that the carving of Crazy Horse’s face bears almost no resemblance to what the man looked like in life. That can be forgiven, he thinks, since Crazy Horse never allowed a photograph of himself to be taken or a portrait to be painted.

What is less forgivable, to Paha Sapa’s large-sculpture-trained eye, is that the quality of the carving and sculpture here is far inferior to Gutzon Borglum’s work. The entire pose is strained and awkward and clichéd and Paha Sapa can see almost none of the nuance that Borglum and his son worked so hard to achieve in their brute-force, pneumatic-drill efforts to evoke even the slightest shadings and tiniest minor hints of the dead presidents’ facial muscles and furrowed brows and most subtle expressions.

This huge, blocky, gesturing hero-Indian and his strangely European-feeling stone doodle of a prancing horse look to Paha Sapa—in comparison to Borglum’s work—as if they have been carved out of a bar of Ivory soap by a bored schoolboy with a dull knife.

Without asking the voices within him, he knows that the Sioux and Cheyenne and other nearby tribes hate this thing. He doesn’t know all their reasons for hating it and does not want to know. In a real sense, he does not need to ask; he already knows within himself. He only wishes he had another chance at this new target with his twenty-one crates of dynamite.

If he had a voice now, Paha Sapa would scream—You brought me forward in time again to see this? Will this punishment never end?

But he has no voice.

Still, the raven leaves the giant cartoon of Crazy Horse behind and turns north and gains altitude again, flapping and coasting its way out of the Black Hills and past Bear Butte again, onto the Great Plains.

THE CHANGES HERE are obvious and immediately visible.

The endless curving ring of autobahn is still there, but it looks aged and gray and there is little traffic on it. The cities and towns are much smaller. Rapid City looks to be a third the size it was in Paha Sapa’s day, much less in the mindless sprawl he just saw in his second vision. Spearfish is all but gone. Deadwood and Keystone and Casper and Lead, he realizes, are gone—there are no wasichu towns at all in the Black Hills when the raven flies north.

He has no idea what kind of catastrophe has caused this disappearance of so much and so many but his spirit-skin goes cold considering the possibilities.

The real shocks are still ahead.

Just north of the strangely empty autobahn, all former signs of habitation and what the wasichus invariably called civilization simply cease.

As the raven loses altitude, Paha Sapa can see that the state and county highways are… gone: blown up, broken up, plowed under, or simply overgrown. Only the vaguest traceries of straight lines, overgrown with healthy plants, give a hint of where all those dividing lines were.

He realizes that all the ranches are also missing. No single war or natural catastrophe could cause that, could it? Removing buildings and leaving not even the foundations, while the autobahn and smaller versions of Rapid City and other towns remain to the south and east? No, not war or plague or some natural catastrophe could account for that. This emptying-out of an entire region has to be the result of a purposeful, planned migration and of a careful deconstructing and removal of the works of man built here over a century and more… but to what purpose?

Why would the wasichus concievably unbuild and remove the ranches, barns, roads, power lines, sewer lines, stock tanks, fences, vehicles, cities, small towns, dogs, pigs, chickens, cattle, and other imported species—including themselves—that they had taken almost two centuries to seed the earth here with?

Paha Sapa realizes as the raven continues to descend that a tall fence runs parallel to the autobahn for as far as the raven’s eye can see in both directions. The raven takes care to land not on that fence, but on a nearby old wooden fence post with no wire attached.

That is something else that is missing beyond this point, Paha Sapa realizes—fences. Barbed wire. All the fences that sliced the prairie through all of the 20th Century and then resliced and resliced it again into ever smaller shapes are… gone.

There is a sign on the fence and while Paha Sapa has no idea if the raven with its small but wily brain can read it, Paha Sapa can.

danger—high voltage

Twenty yards to their left is an elaborate double gate with a cattle guard of round bars as the flooring. Paha Sapa guesses that the gate is automated. (This is the future, after all.)

The sign on the gate makes much less sense to him than did the high-voltage warning.

P.M.R.P. Tracts 237H—305J Access with Permits Only Warning: No Food, Shelter, or Services for the Next 183 Miles Warning: Dangerous Animals Warning: Human Contact May Be Hostile Permit Holders Proceed at Your Own Risk U.S. Dept of the Interior and Sec. of U.S.P.M.R.P.

The raven hops off the fence post and soars over the fence as if it does not exist. Bear Butte is within this wild area. Paha Sapa can see where there has been a winding road in to the rising butte, perhaps a parking lot and visitors area, maybe even a visitors’ center with restrooms or some sort of small museum.

They are all gone now, their former presence indicated only by a preponderance of weeds where the concrete and asphalt and foundations have been broken up.

The plant life is rich and varied both on and around Bear Butte. In Paha Sapa’s day there were mostly ponderosa pines on the hill itself, as well as some scrubby junipers. Now there is a profusion of pine and fir on the butte itself. The prairie at the base of the butte was mostly yucca and low, sparse grasses in Paha Sapa’s time: now it is rich with diverse plants, many of them unidentifiable to Paha Sapa’s eye.

He sees faded ribbons—prayer flags—and patches of once-colored cloth filled with tobacco hanging from the branches of the scrub oak and other deciduous trees that grow along the creek at the base of the butte. This doesn’t make much sense. The offerings are Sioux or Cheyenne… but don’t the electrified fence and gate sign five or six miles back suggest that all this is off-limits to most people?

The raven takes wing again, flying north along its now-familiar route to the river where Paha Sapa lost his band’s sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa sixty years ago and where most of that band and Paha Sapa’s extended family were wiped out by elements of Crook’s cavalry.

The day is even hotter down here than it was in the Black Hills but the land beneath the raven’s wings is not desert. Far from it.

The grasses are even richer and taller here than near Bear Butte. Paha Sapa saw only tiny patches of true tallgrass prairie as a child; now it extends east and west and north for as far as the raven’s eye can see from five thousand feet. Its bending in the wind that has come up is slower and more sinuous even than the Hand of God stroking of the world’s fur he remembered from the shorter grass prairie beyond his village.

He has no idea how the ancient tallgrass prairie could have returned.

Fire. Bison herds. Burning. Time.

The voice in his nagi spirit-ear is Rain’s, his great-granddaughter Constance’s, Limps-a-Lot’s, Robert’s, and the wisest of the Six Grandfathers’.

Paha Sapa is moved to tears he cannot shed, but he still does not understand.

The raven swoops, clears a grassy hilltop by only fifty feet, and Paha Sapa sees.

Buffalo. Bison. Filling the valley. Filling the hilltops to the north. The herd stretching off east and west and north for miles. Thousands of buffalo. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. More.

The raven banks west toward the river.

The mountains so far beyond to the west—seen only by the raven’s magical predator’s eye—are totally without snow now. Not even the peaks have a dash of white. The river is narrower, its level much lower, obviously not supplied by melting snow from those now-dry distant peaks. But the water that remains is clear and dark and looks clean enough to drink without worry; even in Paha Sapa’s day there were compelling reasons not to drink from a local stream.

The raven circles and Paha Sapa gasps—or makes an equivalent nagi spirit–sound to a gasp.

The wildlife here near the river is extensive. And large.

Besides the bison herd that stretches on to three of the horizons, there are running herds of small, tan horses. Not the same as the tiny horses he saw from 11,000 and more years ago, but similar. Very similar.

—Przewalski’s horses.

Paha Sapa has no idea who Mr. Przewalski is, but he likes his horses—tiny, tough, wild, black-maned, as alert as any wild prey. And he absolutely loves the sound of the sweet voice.

A line of camels comes out of the deciduous forest to drink.

—Bactrian camels from the Gobi Desert to stand in for the extinct Camelops hesternus—Western Camel—that evolved here and was so successful in the Pleistocene. But it’s amazing how similar the DNA is.

Paha Sapa has not the slightest clue as to what DNA is or was, but he could listen to this voice forever. He wants it to never stop.

—There were four species of Proboscidea here during the Pleistocene, Paha Sapa—Mammuthus columbi, the prevalent Columbian mammoth; Mammut americanum, the American mastodon; Mammuthus exillis, the Dwarf mammoth—not quite so common—and your and my old friend Mammuthus primigenius, the Woolly mammoth we saw reconstructed at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Paha Sapa weeps silently at that.

—After much testing, we decided that the genotype of the endangered Asian elephant was the closest to our missing friends. And it adapts well to the warming climate across the Great Plains. But there are several thousand African elephants here as well—if only to save them from the environmental disasters in Africa over the past thirty years.

Elephants? Paha Sapa thinks just as a group of them comes out of the high, blowing grass of the low hills and lumbers down toward the river. One of the smallest wants to run down ahead of the herd, but the mother—or at least one of the females—restrains the youngster with the gentle curve of her trunk.

A cluster of drinking Bactrian camels and groups of pronghorn antelope scatter at the approach of the elephants. But they scatter along the east side of the river.

On the west side, a large pride of lions crouch to drink.

—From southern Africa. The last of their kind. But they are doing wonderfully well here. The prides in the PMRP’s eastern tracts beyond the Missouri River number in the thousands now. For some reason it makes it a more popular area. There are only four hundred trekker permits given out for that area each year and we get more than a million requests.

Trekker? Paha Sapa mentally repeats to himself.

A jaguar has just emerged from the tall grasses beyond the river, then effortlessly disappears again. Paha Sapa wonders if he actually saw it. Something like a very large sloth is watching the jaguar from the trees. The sloth’s curved claws are long and black. The plants along the river—whose banks are no longer tumbledown from cattle—grow in almost shocking variety. The grass here looks like a manicured lawn in places.

—One of the side effects of diversified grazing.

Hundreds of yards upstream, a bald eagle is circling, looking for carrion or fish. Paha Sapa’s raven does not react as if threatened this time. Paha Sapa thinks—The one constant. There are always eagles.

But the raven rises again anyway, turning southeast. The tour must be over. Paha Sapa wants to shout; he wants to weep; but most of all, he wants to hear the chorus of beloved voices once again. But he knows his tour is over.

—It’s not over yet, Paha Sapa. You haven’t even seen the best part yet.

A minute later he glimpses them through the raven’s incredible eyes. A tiny scattering of white marks there, miles away and miles below in that river valley. Then a tiny scattering of white triangles there, miles away and miles below in the opposite direction, along a tallgrass prairie ridgeline.

The raven banks right and swoops toward the ridgeline.

Dear All, thinks Paha Sapa. Dear Wakan Tanka. Let this death-dream be real.

Out in the valley this side of the white triangles, boys watch over a small herd of horses. These are the largest versions of the strange, wild horses Paha Sapa has just seen running wild across the prairie. They are pony sized but not docile. The boys here obviously have to be on their toes to keep these small herds of captured horses captured.

The raven continues rising toward the ridgeline.

It is a small tiyospaye, no more than twenty lodges, but the tipis are tall and well made, the tipi poles made of stripped lodgepole pines of just the right length—like the fingers of a hand—the first three poles making a star and the star shape making a vortex of powerful light for those who will live within its welcoming power. If arranged correctly, the full ten poles of each tipi represent the universe’s deepest morality—the oho¸ki˙cilaþi of mutal respect toward all things—and the ten oho¸ki˙cilaþ poles are arranged correctly and covered with the clean, bright hides of buffalo with the hair scraped off properly. The lodges are arranged in circles as commanded to the Natural Free Human Beings by Bird Woman and by the Six Grandfathers, so that people’s homes will repeat the sacred-hoop pattern of the universe itself.

There are people moving around the tiyospaye as the raven lands atop a tipi pole, and Paha Sapa sees that the men and women are wearing handmade clothing similar to that he wore as a boy… similar, but not a museum re-creation. Many of the skins and hides are the same, antelope and deer and buffalo, all scraped smooth, softened by women’s chewing, but there are other textures and colors he cannot identify. He sees a war shield propped against a tipi and realizes with a shock that the hide of the shield is made of elephant skin.

An older man walks by, someone important, Paha Sapa guesses based on the beadwork on his moccasins and the perfection of his fringed tunic and trousers, but on this warrior’s shoulders and head are the hide, mane, and roaring jaw of a lion.

Paha Sapa would blink if he had eyelids.

These are Natural Free Human Beings. Paha Sapa can hear through his raven’s ultrasharp ears as the people speak in a soft, oddly accented Lakota. Then Paha Sapa realizes what the Lakota accent reminds him of—Robert’s slight accent when he learned the language from his father. Perhaps some of these men and women were English speakers before they adopted Lakota. Or perhaps the dialect has just changed over time, as it does in every language.

Then something strange happens.

Four boys are sitting on a log nearby, tossing knives at a circle drawn in the dirt in a game Paha Sapa knew well as a boy, when suddenly there are soft musical notes in the air.

One of the boys excuses himself from the game, reaches into a pocket on his deerskin trousers, and answers something that must be a telephone but that is no larger or thicker than a playing card. The boy speaks for a minute—still in smooth Lakota—then folds away the impossible phone, returns it to his pocket, and comes back to the game.

—Have you seen enough to understand, Paha Sapa? It took us years before we understood that the ecosystem of the Pleistocene Megafauna Rewilding Project would be worthless unless we rewilded the most central of all the late-Pleistocene megafauna predators—man. But this time, there will be no mass extinctions because of our presence. Herd population management applies not just to the four-leggeds. And Connie was the first among us to see who deserved the choice—the right—to live in the PMRP Reserves, as long as they did so by the rules of the epoch they had come to live in. The children’s phones… well, some things cannot be denied, in any culture, and it was agreed that they were an important safety feature. Adults may choose to live among jaguars, lions, and grizzly bears, but children should be able to phone for help. Even so, the phones work only within the confines of the preserve and the children must give them up when they turn fifteen if they want to remain living in the preserve.

Paha Sapa knows that he’s dreaming now but it’s all right. Like Hamlet, what he always feared most about death was the possibility that one might still dream.

But this is all right.

The raven launches itself into the air and flaps for altitude, circling first to gain height and then heading southwest.

Once airborne, Paha Sapa sees something to the northeast that he missed before. A ribbon of silver steel running along the east-west river valley and silver-and-glass glinting carriages moving slowly beneath the ribbon.

Paha Sapa knows at once what it is. He has seen pictures of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn—the monorail in Wuppertal, Germany, built and opened sometime around 1900. Just as with that Schwebebahn, he can see the sleek carriages hanging under the thin rail line here, the view unimpeded from the mostly glass-walled cars. With his raven-vision, he can see the silhouettes of the passengers even from miles away and from thousands of feet higher. Some are seated; some are standing. It reminds Paha Sapa of the joyous passengers in the 1893 Ferris Wheel.

—Three hundred trekker permits and a few commercial safari camps, of course, carefully regulated, but more than forty-two million people a year—tourists—pay to ride through all or part of the Great Plains Pleistocene Megafauna Rewilding Preserve. It’s become North America’s preeminent tourist attraction. But it’s time for you to go home, Paha Sapa. As much as we hate to see you go.

Paha Sapa feels right now much as he felt that day on the Ferris Wheel on the Midway of the Great White City—the first hours he spent with Rain.

He thinks—I don’t need to go. I’m already in a better version of Heaven than my people or Rain’s father could ever concoct. But if it’s time to go to Heaven, I’m ready.

The voices’ collective laugh sounds a bit like Robert’s, much like Rain’s, only a little like Limps-a-Lot’s, some like a lady’s he’s never met, and not at all that much like the Six Grandfathers’. The last words they will ever say to him are odd.

—Go to Heaven? Like hell. That baptism went to your head, Paha Sapa. There’s too much work left undone.

THE RAVEN FLIES DUE WEST and then north by west.

The ocean of time flows in, covering everything below like low clouds, and the shafts of sunlight on the water seem to move with the flying bird. Paha Sapa tries to remember the sentence he likes from Bleak House, but he is not able to form coherent thoughts.

The sea of time ebbs away. The low, rolling hills below are brown and tan and brown again, the only green in the meandering river valley with its picket line of old cottonwoods.

The raven does not swoop this time; it drops in a near-vertical high-speed dive that terrifies Paha Sapa.

No… I cannot… I’m not ready… I don’t…

Ravens listen to no one. It does not slow as it continues its mad dive toward the brown hill with its high brown grass.

The impact is terrible.

THEY LIED.

As much as they love him—and he knows they do—they lied.

This is Heaven.

Paha Sapa is lying on the top step of the stairs leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain in front of the main Administration Building in the White City, with his head in Rain’s lap and with Rain looking down at him with concern. He does not even care that other people have gathered around.

His lips are dry, but he whispers up to his concerned darling—Tokša ake wancinyankin ktelo.

“I will see you later.” It’s the phrase he taught her just two hours ago in the Ferris Wheel and it is their bond of betrothal. Both know it. Neither have acknowledged it yet.

—Oh, Monsieur Slow Horse, we are so relieved.

It is not Rain speaking but the older woman. The mother.

His daughter-in-law. Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette. (How strange to meet someone with his darling’s last name.)

And the woman on whose lap his head is resting is not twenty-year-old Rain but his seventeen-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, the only-just-pregnant and engaged-to-be-married Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette.

Paha Sapa tries to sit up but three pairs of hands push him back down.

The mustached chauffeur—Roger—has joined them, Paha Sapa realizes. Roger has brought water in—amazingly—a crystal pitcher. He offers a crystal glass with—more amazingly, impossibly—real ice in it and Paha Sapa obediently sips the iced water. It tastes wonderful.

Roger helps him to a sitting postion, and while the ladies are standing and brushing off dried grass and briars, the chauffeur whispers something in French or Belgian or, more likely, Irish, and surreptitiously hands Paha Sapa a small silver flask. Paha Sapa drinks.

It is the first whiskey he has drunk since he was seventeen years old, and it is by far the best he has ever drunk.

Roger helps him to his feet while both the ladies ineffectually paw and push and pull at him with their little white hands. Paha Sapa sways but, with Roger’s help, stays standing.

—I was sure I was dead. Certain I’d had a stroke.

Roger says in an American-enough accent now—

—Sunstroke, more likely. Better get in out of the sun.

Paha Sapa can hear the unspoken “old timer” at the end of that. He just nods.

His son’s strangely middle-aged wife, Renée (he hopes to God that they’ll be on a first-name basis soon), says—

—Monsieur… I am sorry, I must become used to the American expression…Mister Slow Horse…

—Please call me Paha Sapa. It means Black Hills, and it’s my real name.

—Ah, oui… yes… of course. Robert did tell me this. Mr. Paha Sapa, we are staying at the… oh, I can’t think of the name of it, but it appears to be the only decent hotel in Billings… Roger knows the name… and if we leave now, we could have lunch together in the dining room there. We have much, I think, to talk about.

Paha Sapa’s answer is said from a great distance but sincere.

—Yes, I would like that.

—And, of course, you need to get out of the sun at once. You must ride with us. Roger, would you please give Monsieur… Mister… Paha Sapa a hand back to the car.

Paha Sapa stops Roger’s helpful hand before it can touch him. He looks at his son’s wife.

—It’s just Paha Sapa, Mademoiselle… may I call you Renée? It’s such a pretty name, and it reminds me of one I love dearly.

Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette blushes fiercely and for a second Paha Sapa can clearly see the beautiful young nineteen-year-old girl with whom his romantic son fell in love. He realizes that the marriage must have been just days before the influenza and overwhelming pneumonia descended on Robert, and he also knows that there is a long and serious story—possibly having to do with the father’s and family’s horror that she married a gentile—behind her having never contacted him before this.

He wants to hear it all. He says softly—

—I’ll follow you into town on the motorcycle. It’s Robert’s, as you know, and I don’t want to leave it here. I’ll be all right. Just keep an eye on me in the mirror, Roger, and if I start driving or acting goofy again, you can stop for me.

The chauffeur grins under his mustache and nods. The four begin walking back toward the road and parking area.

—Oh, monsieur… sir… you have forgotten this.

His granddaughter is holding out the canvas shoulder bag with the Colt revolver in it. If she is surprised by the heaviness of the bag or if she has peeked inside, she says and shows nothing.

—Thank you, mademoiselle.

They discuss logistics again and then the small procession is moving, the long white Pierce-Arrow turning around in three tries and the Harley-Davidson J putt-putting along behind it.

As they pass Last Stand Hill on the left, Paha Sapa stops, lets the motorcycle idle while the sedan moves on ahead of him. Looking at the stone monument and the white headstones dotting the hillside, he suddenly realizes—My ghost is gone.

It is not an altogether pleasant sensation. As he realized only yesterday, George Armstrong Custer had been married to his Libbie for twelve years when he died; Paha Sapa had been married to Rain de Plachette for four years when she died. But Paha Sapa and Custer’s ghost were together for sixty years, two months, and some days.

Paha Sapa shakes his head. The pain in him seems to have receded a bit.

He looks to the southeast, toward the distant and quite invisible Black Hills and all he has left behind there… and all he might yet see and do there.

When he whispers the next words, they are not offered to the bones or memories buried on this battlefield hill in Montana, but to those people he has loved and fought against and lived with and worked alongside of and held close and seen slip away and lost forever and found again in sacred places elsewhere, not close to this place, and yet also not so very far away from this place.

—Toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo. Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin!

I shall see you again with the the eye of my heart. So be it. All my relatives—every one of us!