Black Hills (29 page)

Every time now that the thunder echoes through the Black Hills, Paha Sapa flinches and huddles tighter. He does not want to be a
heyoka.
He does not want to serve the fierce and warlike Thunder Beings. And at the same time he is ashamed of this shrinking back, this cowardice, this stubbornness in wanting to refuse his role in life if that is the will of the All.

But the Thunder Beings do not speak to him there on the summit of the Six Grandfathers, even while real thunder echoes and lightning flashes and Paha Sapa huddles in his muddy hole, fearful of lightning in such a high, exposed place.

He is, he realizes, not only a failure as a vision-seeker, but a cowardly failure.

O
N THE NIGHT
of his ninth day of fasting, Paha Sapa realizes that he soon will be too weak to hunt or find food even if a Vision does appear to him. That night he stumbles down the long, steep mountainside to the vale where the two staked horses still crop and drink from the stream and—with infinite and slow-motion labor—he makes four rabbit traps, which he sets in the trees and shrubs on the hillside. Then, seeing how his
sintkala waksu
sweat lodge seems to be melting in the continued downpour, Paha Sapa takes his robe and the pipe now hanging from his neck by a sturdy strap and makes the long, arduous climb and crawl back up to the summit ridge, arriving just in time to make offerings and prayers to a sunrise hidden behind clouds.

On his tenth day of fasting, Paha Sapa tries to fly.

He is so weak now that he spends much of his time sitting and leaning against one of the Four Directions posts as he offers the sacred pipe, but he is also so weak and light-headed that his
nagi
spirit-self slips easily from his body. (Afraid that it will not return, Paha Sapa entices it back with promises of a rabbit cooked to perfection over a crackling fire.)

His
nagi
leans into the slight breeze that blows up here most of the time, feeling the wind against his spirit-chest much as he used to feel the water in a deep part of a stream or river and be ready to kick off to float and swim, but—unlike so many times before when rising into the sky came so easily—the winds now do not bear him up.

Even his spirit is too heavy to soar.

Thus on Paha Sapa’s tenth day of fasting and mumbling of prayers and heavy-armed offering of the stem of the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
to low clouds and rain, he thinks dully of admitting failure and going home.

Crazy Horse will kill me.

But certainly Crazy Horse must have moved on by now. The war chief was planning to lead his band against the
wasichus
in the Black Hills and then scout out the cavalry that were coming seeking vengeance for the rubbing out of Long Hair. The chance that Crazy Horse would still be with Angry Badger’s and Limps-a-Lot’s band camped near Slim Buttes is low.

And return a total failure, never to claim a vision, never to become a
wičasa wakan
like my adoptive
tunkašila?

Better to be a failure than to be a corpse, Black Hills. You knew you were never cut out to be a warrior, a brave…. Now you know that you were not meant to be a holy man or an important man in the tribe.

Paha Sapa comes very close to sobbing. Sitting with his back against the western post, waiting for his sunset prayers, the red banner hanging thick, wet, and soggy above him, his sullen
nagi
aching in his chest, and the goddamned
wasichu
ghost always babbling in his aching brain, Paha Sapa decides that he will stay here on the Six Grandfathers for one more night, perhaps one more wet day, before surrendering his hopes and riding home.

If
the traps have not captured a rabbit, you will die, unless you slaughter Worm or White Crane.

Shaking that thought out of his head, Paha Sapa closes his eyes in the rain as he waits for the approximate time of sunset behind the lowering clouds.

H
E AWAKES LYING NAKED
on his back near his vision pit. It is very dark, and the clouds have gone away. The sky is ablaze with the three thousand or so tightly packed stars he is used to seeing on such a late-summer night. For a moment he is panicked, thinking that he may have dropped the sacred pipe on the steep rocky summit, but then he feels the strap and finds the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
strangely warm across his bare belly.

Shooting stars scratch across the black between-the-stars night glass of the sky. Paha Sapa remembers that this time right after his birthing day has always been rich with shooting stars. Limps-a-Lot once told him that some elders believe that the falling stars celebrate some great battle or victory or Vision that has long been lost to the memory of the Natural Free Human Beings.

Paha Sapa is content to lie there on his back, half in his Vision Pit and half out, the cooling rock of the mountain strangely dry under his shoulders and head, and watch the stars fall.

Suddenly a shooting star brighter than all the others streaks from the zenith. It is so bright that it lights up the skies, lights up the summit of the Six Grandfathers, lights up towering Evil Spirit Hill and all the other surrounding peaks. The millions of dark pine trees in the Paha Sapa suddenly grow silver and then milky white in the light of this falling star turned hurtling comet.

—
Ooooh!

Paha Sapa cannot help making the noise. It is the same noise he made as a tiny boy watching the late-summer falling-star showers when there was an especially bright one. But he has never seen any star falling with such dazzling brilliance as this one.

And, he realizes with a slow stirring of what might have been fear if he’d had more energy and presence of mind, it is headed directly for him.

The shadows of the direction posts and of the few stunted trees near the rocky summit leap away in all directions from the hurtling brilliance directly above him. Paha Sapa can
hear
the falling star now—a hissing, roaring, galloping sound as the star burns through the air.

Suddenly, silently, the falling star explodes, dividing into six different and only slightly smaller falling stars. They continue hurtling down toward him.

Paha Sapa realizes through his hunger and exhaustion, with something like bemused detachment, that he is going to die in a few seconds.

The six fragments of the Great Star hurtle lower. Each fragment is going to strike the Six Grandfathers; one, it seems, right here on the summit. At the last moment, Paha Sapa puts his forearm over his eyes.

No impact. No explosions. No noise whatsoever except for the slightest stirring of the ponderosa pine trees and fir trees in a slight breeze.

Paha Sapa lowers his arm and peeks out.

The six stars are all around the summit but they appear now as six shafts of vertical white light. Each shaft must be two hundred feet tall. Inside each shaft or upright cocoon of light is an old man who looks to be of the Natural Free Human Beings, and each old man is wearing a perfect white buffalo robe and has one white eagle feather in his gray hair. All of them are staring at Paha Sapa, and their gaze is unlike any human gaze the boy has ever encountered. He can feel the pressure of those gazes.

—
Will you come with us, Black Hills?

Paha Sapa’s head snaps around. He did not see any of their lips move. Nor did he
hear
the question, exactly. At least not with his ears. For many decades after this he will try to recall and describe their voices—certainly not sounds of the sort men make in their throats and mouths, or with their tongues and teeth, but more the subtle whisper of wind moving branches or the deep vibration of distant thunder felt or the slight bone-shake of approaching horse herds or buffalo such as the boy heard when, imitating the older men, he put his ear tight to the earth.

Except none of these comparisons is right either. He knows then and later that it does not matter.

—
Of course I will come, Grandfathers.

One of the giant forms reaches out a hand encased in white light. Paha Sapa takes one step and realizes that all of him fits perfectly into the weathered palm.

They rise quickly and silently into the blazing night sky. Somehow, Paha Sapa can hear the sound of the stars—each star a voice, each voice a part of a chorus, the chorus of three thousand and more voices chanting a melodic prayer unlike any he has ever heard.

When they are many thousands of feet above the starlit landscape, the six forms cease rising and hover, Paha Sapa comfortable and unworried in the warm palm.

But when he finally leans over the edge of the giant, reassuringly cupped palm to look down upon the sacred Hills, Paha Sapa almost screams in terror.

The Black Hills are gone. Everything is gone.

Beneath him, beneath the hovering, cloudlike Six Grandfathers and him, an endless expanse of water stretches away to both of the distant, dark, and slightly curved horizons. The world is water without end.

Paha Sapa realizes at once that he is looking down on the world without form that existed before
Wakan Tanka
, the Mystery, the All, brought forth land and the four-leggeds and then man. This is the world before man, when
taku wankan
, the Things Mysterious, walked abroad in the spirit world: the
Wakinyan
Thunderbird, the
Tatanka
Great Beast, the
Unktehi
One Who Kills, the
Taku Skanskan
He Who Changes Things,
Tunkan
the Venerable One. All the pure
nagi
spirit-beings who walked the skies above a world still drowned in placental water and waiting to be born.

This is the all-water world that Limps-a-Lot has told him of in the Oldest Stories, but Paha Sapa has never been able to imagine it before this. Now the sea stretches out on all sides below him.

Paha Sapa realizes that the stars have been occluded by high clouds. Now there are gray clouds infinitely high above him and gray, almost waveless water infinitely far below him. He understands in his heart that the Six Grandfathers are allowing him to join them for the Birth.

Suddenly a single shaft of light—the boy knows at once that the light comes from the Mystery, the All—breaks the ceiling of
clouds above and splits the intervening sky until it touches the sea below. The waters churn. Out of the World Sea rise, dripping, the hills and black trees and sacred stone of the heart of the heart of the world—the Black Hills. The shaft of light fades, but the Black Hills remain below, a tiny dark island in a vaguely glowing endless sea. For a while as Paha Sapa watches from the safety of the Grandfather’s curled palm, the only sound is of the wind caressing the trees and grasses and wavetops so far beneath him. Paha Sapa understands that the winds he hears whispering are the hushed voices of other great Spirits existing here before the first men arrived:
Tate
, the Wind Essence;
Yate
, the North Wind;
Yanpa
, the East Wind;
Okaga
, the South Wind.

To all these winds has Paha Sapa prayed and chanted alongside Limps-a-Lot, training as a boy to be a holy man someday, and to all these winds Paha Sapa now silently prays again. Their presence makes him want to weep.

The sun rises. The sunlight paints dark strokes of mountain-shadows and pine-tree-shadows on the face of the Hills and throws more shadows of small hills and isolated trees on the long meadows. Then the waters around this island world recede farther, and the prairies and plains and
Maku Sichu
Bad Lands emerge glistening into the light. Solid land has now replaced the covering seas from horizon to horizon. The world has become mostly
maka
, earth, and it is ready for the four-leggeds and the two-leggeds to live on it now.

Paha Sapa wants to ask the Six Grandfathers why they are showing him these things, but his
nagi
spirit-voice is too weak—or the air up here too thin—for the word-sounds to reach the Grandfathers’ ears. He can only look up and nod at the ancient, lined but friendly faces shifting slightly as towering clouds tend to shift in sacred winds.