Black Hills (4 page)

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.

W
HEN
P
AHA
S
APA
S
TOPS
S
PEAKING
—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.

P
AHA SAPA KNOWS THAT HE WAS BORN DURING THE MOON OF
Ripening in the Year the Lightning Struck the Ponies.

He knows that Lakota children are almost never named after places—his name, Paha Sapa, Black Hills, is very unusual and it made the other boys snicker—but he also knows that on the night that he was born near Bear Butte at the end of that hot, strange summer when the lightning struck the pony herd three times, the three most important men in the village—their war chief, Angry Badger; their old, tired
wičasa wakan
, Loud Voice Hawk; and their best and real
wičasa wakan
, Limps-a-Lot—all dreamed of the Black Hills.

In his dream, Angry Badger saw a white wolf running out of the dark hills surrounded and backlit by lightning and the wolf spoke with thunder and on the wolf’s back was a crying and naked baby boy.

Loud Voice Hawk dreamed that he was young again and able to ride his favorite horse,
Píšco
—Nighthawk—who had been dead more than thirty years, and Nighthawk galloped so fast that he carried Loud Voice Hawk into the night air, into the lightning itself, and when the Black Hills were below him, a huge white
cetán
—a hawk like the one he had been named after seventy-four summers before—rose up out of those hills and the hawk was carrying a naked baby boy child in its talons.

Limps-a-Lot had not dreamed so much as had a vision. The thunder and lightning had wakened him and he had left his two wives and
gone out into the hot, wild night—a night made wilder by the screams of Stands in Water dying as she worked to birth her child—and in the lightning to the north, beyond the hulking shape of
Matho Paha
, Bear Butte, Limps-a-Lot saw a baby boy’s face drawn by lightning in the clouds above the Black Hills.

The morning after that fatherless boy was born and after the mother had bled to death and been prepared for burial by the women, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and Limps-a-Lot met in a closed lodge for six hours, smoking the pipe and discussing their dreams and visions. They decided that—as odd as it would sound to all Natural Free Human Beings—the orphan baby, if he lived, should be named Paha Sapa, for the infant had come from the Black Hills in each of their dreams.

Paha Sapa has learned more about the details of his birth and about his dead parents than one might expect for a child who never knew his parents. He knows, for instance, exactly why his mother, Stands in Water, with only sixteen summers, died giving birth to him, and that her death was related to the fact that his equally young father, Short Elk, had been killed by Pawnee three months before Paha Sapa’s birth.

He knew that Short Elk, who had not yet fully seen seventeen summers, had won Stands in Water in a raid on a Crow village where Short Elk had shown either much bravery or incredible stupidity. The Lakota raiding party had hit the Crow village, scattered their horses, and carried away several women—including Stands in Water, a Lakota who had been captive of the Crow for four years—and when the Crow warriors finally found horses, the twelve Lakota warriors had fled. But Short Elk had turned back, shouted
Hokahey!
, lifted his arms as if flying, and ridden through the Crow lines as they all fired and shot arrows at him. Nothing touched Short Elk. Then he rode
back
through the Crow skirmish lines, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, and his arms out to his sides. For his courage, Angry Badger and the other warriors had awarded him Stands in Water as his bride.