Black Hills (28 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is as it should be.

N
OTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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