Black Hills

Chapter 3 Along the Greasy Grass

PAHA SAPA SIPS THE WARM SOUP. ALL THE FINELY SCRAPED buffalo hide walls of Limps-a-Lot’s lodge glow orange from the multitude of fires burning in the village outside. It is very late, but a cacophony of singing and chants and the thudding of drums can be heard—cacophony to Paha Sapa’s ears because it is a harsh and unusual mixture of celebrations and mournings, peppered throughout by screams of mourning women, exultant cries from celebrating warriors, and the continued rifle shots from both within the camp and from more distant shots echoing from the dark hills across the river to the southeast. Hundreds of warriors, many of them blind drunk by now, are taking turns trying to sneak up on the surviving wasichus surrounded up there, shooting at the soldiers whenever they think they see the dark shape of a head or body poke up from the dug-in circle of bluecoats cowering on the dark hilltop.

Besides Limps-a-Lot, there are three other older men in the lodge: Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull), Foolish Elk, and an old Rock-dreamer yuwipi holy man named Long Turd. Paha Sapa, only half listening to the desultory talk among the old men, realizes that Long Turd is saying that he spent much of the afternoon’s battle conferring with Crazy Horse, even going so far as to build a holy fire of buffalo chips to pray over during one of the pauses when Crazy Horse and his men were gathering fresh ponies. At the mention of Crazy Horse’s name, Paha Sapa flushes with shame. He hopes he will never have to see Limps-a-Lot’s older wife’s cousin again.

—Black Hills, tell us what you have to tell us.

It is Sitting Bill who gives the command. Even though most of the younger warriors have been talking and celebrating as if the day’s work has been a huge victory, Sitting Bull sounds so sad that one would think it has been a great defeat for the Lakota and Cheyenne. And while Limps-a-Lot, Long Turd, and the younger Foolish Elk have all dressed more formally for the evening, Sitting Bull, who is old—he has seen at least forty-two summers according to Limps-a-Lot—is wearing his everyday outfit of a fringed buckskin shirt embroidered only with green porcupine quills and modest tassels of human hair attached at the shoulders, leggings, moccasins, and a red breechcloth. His braids are wrapped in otter skins and adorned with a single eagle feather set upright.

Paha Sapa nods, sets down his soup, composes himself cross-legged on the soft hide, and thinks about what he will say. Limps-a-Lot has told the other three men about the ghost—it is why they are here tonight listening to a boy rather than out celebrating or mourning or, in Foolish Elk’s case, up the hill shooting at the surviving wasichus—and Paha Sapa knows that it is the identity of the bluecoat whose ghost he carries that most interests the two holy men and the warrior-friend of Crazy Horse here.

Paha Sapa closes his eyes for a minute to bring the afternoon’s events out of the smoke and haze of the day’s terrible memory. He hopes that when he opens his eyes to speak—and to speak as succinctly as Limps-a-Lot taught him as a small boy and as clearly as he can given the Wasicun’s ghost’s continued gibbering and throbbing in his mind—the few flat, emotionless words will emerge almost in the form of a monotone chant. But before he opens his eyes to speak briefly, Paha Sapa takes time to recall it all in detail.

HE HAD NOT COME TO FIGHT. Paha Sapa knew he was no warrior—his single, sad expedition against the Crow the previous spring had taught him that—but that afternoon, when the shooting started at the southeast end of the huge village of tipis that filled the valley, he and Limps-a-Lot ran out of the older man’s lodge. It was very exciting. Akicita were trying to keep order, but the young warriors were ignoring the tribal police, shouting and leaping onto their mounts and riding toward the noise of battle. Other braves were rushing to put on their war paint, find their weapons, and chant their death songs. Although Paha Sapa knew he was no warrior at heart, he felt the excitement rise in him as the sound of shooting continued, the dust clouds rose from the east and from the bluffs across the river, and the men of all ages continued to ride out of the village in whooping packs.

—The fighting is at the far end of the village.

Limps-a-Lot pointed to the southeast.

—I want you to stay here until I get back.

And, carrying no weapons, Limps-a-Lot walked slowly away toward the shooting.

Paha Sapa tried to stay put, even when Wolf Eyes, Left Foot, and several other young men he’d met here at the giant gathering rode by, taunting him and shouting for him to find a pony. But they had ridden off to the south before Paha Sapa could decide what to do.

Then there was more shooting coming from the direction of the coulee there at the north end of the village, almost in the opposite direction of the original firing. Paha Sapa had looked up minutes earlier and seen a line of wasichus on horseback moving northwest along the line of bluffs. Was the bluecoat attack at the southeast end of the village merely a feint, Paha Sapa wondered, a distraction—with the full attack coming here at the opposite end where the women and children were gathering? Sitting Bull himself had told Limps-a-Lot only three nights ago that this was a strategy that Long Hair had used when the Wasicun war leader attacked Black Kettle’s village.

A woman screamed that the bluecoats were coming down the coulee and crossing the river at the ford not far from Limps-a-Lot’s lodge, close to where so many of the women and children had gathered. A group of warriors, their horses and their oiled bodies covered with dust from the fighting in the southeast, galloped north through the center of the village to face this new threat, scattering old men, women, and screaming toddlers as they came. A horse trailing that group was without a rider, showing a streak of blood on the blanket. As the riders paused briefly between the lodges to allow the scattering women to get out of their way, this riderless mare came almost to a stop at the rear of the mass of horses and shouting men, her eyes rolling whitely.

Without thinking, Paha Sapa leaped up onto the mare’s back, wrapping both hands in its mane. When the mounted warriors forced past the screaming women and galloped toward the river, Paha Sapa hung on and kicked his heels into the mare’s heaving ribs. It was unnecessary—the animal’s blood was up and, like Paha Sapa’s, its instinct was to run with the herd.

The sound of shooting still came from the long coulee that ran up to the bluffs from the river, and through the dust and smoke, Paha Sapa could see several bodies in the dirt there—some wasichus, several warriors from the village—but whoever was leading this band ignored the coulee and kept going northeast along the river, past bands of fleeing women and children, past the last Lakota and Cheyenne lodges, through the cottonwoods, until the thirty or so mounted warriors with Paha Sapa bringing up the rear splashed across at the second ford and galloped up a deep ravine toward the grassy bluffs above. Paha Sapa almost slipped off as the mare climbed the steep terrain but hung on to the mane with both hands and pressed his knees tight against the horse’s laboring barrel chest as the wheezing, frothing mare, her lungs sounding like a leaky bellows, staggered up onto the grassy ridge.

Paha Sapa had time only for brief glimpses and scattered impressions—steep hogbacks to his right, warriors and wasichus on horseback there, another long ridge wreathed in smoke and dust ahead to his left, clumps of dismounted wasichus and disorganized bands of warriors shooting at one another there and struggling along the entire grassy stretch that rose toward another, higher ridgeline almost a mile to the northwest. Pulling himself upright, Paha Sapa glanced over his shoulder toward the valley but could not see the circles of a thousand tipis below due to the swirling dust and smoke.

He realized that the band of warriors he was riding with was as disorganized as the other clumps of men he saw scattered all over the hillsides here—his group was mostly Lakota, some Miniconjou, a few Cheyenne. Their leader, a man he had never seen before, looked to be Hunkpapa. The man shouted—Hokahey!—and the band of warriors, followed by Paha Sapa, kicked and whipped their ponies toward groups of bluecoat wasichus firing in dismounted clumps scattered up the hillside to their left. Everywhere in the smoke, wasichu horses and warriors’ ponies were screaming and falling, some shot by their bluecoat owners to provide cover, others being shot out from under their riders or away from the soldiers who held their reins. The rattle of gunfire was constant but underlaid with a rising chorus of screams, cries, grunts, chants, and calls. Women on the hillsides were trilling their shrill tremolos of bloody praise as Paha Sapa followed the others out of the last high shrubs at the top of the ravine.

The next few minutes were largely lost to Paha Sapa’s memory; he had blurred recollections of gunsmoke, jumbled impressions of waves of warriors on horseback flowing over and through and past dismounted wasichus, clouded images of warriors on foot encircling the bands of bluecoats and their dead horses, a nightmare sense of the horses—his mare included—simply stampeding back and forth mindlessly between men who were firing at them. He seemed to recall truly crazy sights, such as the Wasicun soldier galloping away with five Lakota warriors behind him. The soldier was getting away when he suddenly raised his revolver and blew his own brains out. Shocked, the warriors pulled their horses up, looked at one another, and rode south toward louder fighting; they wanted nothing to do with the crazy Wasicun’s corpse.

Paha Sapa clearly remembered that at no point did he try to stop the mare so that he could retrieve a rifle or bow or spear or revolver from any of the dead men that littered the grassy hillside. He could not have stopped the mare if he’d tried. Her lathered sides were flowing with her own blood, and the boy realized that she’d been shot several times with rifle and pistol bullets and that there was an arrow sunk deep in her flesh just behind Paha Sapa’s right leg. With each bound, the mare was snorting up larger gobbets and longer streamers of blood, which flew back and coated Paha Sapa’s neck and chest and face, all but blinding him.

Then the warriors wheeled their horses left like a flock of geese changing course, and Paha Sapa saw that they were charging a band of wasichus that had dismounted on the long hillside below the crest of the ridge. As his mare stumbled forward—certainly she could not live through another charge—Paha Sapa decided that he would count coup. This was the reason he had come up from the village. He had no weapon, not even a knife or a coup stick, so he would have to count coup with his bare hand. Paha Sapa remembers now that he had been grinning wildly, perhaps insanely, when he made that decision.

In the midst of the dead and dying wasichus, a very few bluecoats were kneeling or lying prone or standing and firing. One man with his head bare, short hair, balding—the skin of his forehead so white that for an instant Paha Sapa thought that he had already been scalped—was standing and shooting calmly with a beautiful rifle. A cartridge jammed or he ran out of ammunition as Paha Sapa’s band approached—waves of warriors were riding over and past these and the other dismounted and falling wasichus—and the bluecoat Paha Sapa had noticed now carefully set the rifle down, drew two pistols, and began firing one in his direction.

Paha Sapa’s mare finally went down, her forelegs folding under her, throwing him over her neck and head. Incredibly, impossibly, Paha Sapa hit the ground running and kept running, never falling, almost flying with his dead mare’s speed imparted to his own bounding legs, hurtling almost magically through the dead and dying wasichus as the warriors on horseback raced past on either side, screaming and firing arrows and rifles. Paha Sapa kept his eyes on the tall Wasicun now only twenty strides in front of him. The man saw him, whirled, raised one of the pistols, and was shot.

A bullet had struck the balding Wasicun high in the left chest, knocking him off his feet and backward onto a fallen horse. One of the man’s pistols flew out of sight into the dust cloud, but he held on to the other and raised it, coolly aiming at Paha Sapa’s bloody face as the hurtling, panting boy ran closer, closer.

A racing pony knocked Paha Sapa almost off his feet as the Wasicun fired. Paha Sapa heard the bullet buzz past less than a handswidth from his ear. Then he was upright and bouncing forward again, the Wasicun taking cool and careful aim at him, and at that instant some warrior fired over Paha Sapa’s shoulder, striking the bluecoat in the left temple. The man’s head snapped back, and his beautiful pistol fired harmlessly into the air just as Paha Sapa lunged forward and set his palm and five fingers on the white man’s chest.

And the ghost leaped into him.

WHEN PAHA SAPA STOPS SPEAKING—he has condensed all those remembered details into a very few words—there are grunts and then a long silence. When Sitting Bull finally breaks that silence, he addresses himself to Limps-a-Lot.

—When you return to your village, you must perform a Ghost Owning Ceremony with a very big giveaway.

It is Limps-a-Lot’s turn to grunt. Paha Sapa, ever sensitive to his stepfather’s nuances, knows from this noncommittal noise that the old man does not agree with Sitting Bull that a Ghost Ceremony is the proper response to this spirit-possession.

Long Turd holds out his hand to bring silence and attention.

—We will have to know whether this was Long Hair who sent his ghost into the boy. Black Hills, you saw the man die—do you think it was Long Hair?

—I do not know, Grandfather. The Wasicun had very short hair. I think he was an officer. He did have very beautiful guns, both the rifle and the two pistols. These were gone when I returned to the body.

Foolish Elk cleared his throat, obviously hesitant to speak in the company of the three older holy men.

—It is said that Long Hair carries a rifle with eight sides to the barrel. Did you notice that, Black Hills?

—No. Only that it was very fancy and that it fired faster than the other bluecoats’ carbines.

Paha Sapa pauses.

—I am not a warrior. I am sorry for not observing such things more carefully.

Sitting Bull grunts and waves his hand dismissively.

—No one needs apologize for not being a warrior. You are still a boy and apparently do not wish to become a warrior. You are—and you will become—what Wakan Tanka wishes you to be. No man can change that.

As if embarrassed by saying so much, Sitting Bull sneezes and says—

—Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin.

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

Which means that the discussion, for this day, is at an end.

Sitting Bull nods to the others, gets heavily to his feet, and goes out of the lodge without saying another word. Long Turd and Foolish Elk take time to finish their pipes and then follow, pausing to whisper a few words to Limps-a-Lot.

When the other men are gone, Limps-a-Lot looks at his adopted son. His gaze looks weary, perhaps sad.

—They are breaking up the village early tomorrow, but in the morning, if more wasichus do not arrive to save their friends, Sitting Bull and I will go up and try to find the body of the bluecoat who has infected you and we will try to determine if it was Long Hair. You will lead us to him.

Paha Sapa nods. His hands have been trembling since he awoke safe in Limps-a-Lot’s lodge this evening and he continues to clench his fists to hide the shaking.

Limps-a-Lot touches his back.

—Try to sleep again, my son, despite all the crazy noise from the camp. We will leave before first light and while the other bands head west and north or back to the agencies—I think that Sitting Bull will take his people far away to the north—you and I will head east to home. There we will confer with the others and decide what to do about your ghost.