Black Hills (42 page)

He has lost the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

Curly. Paha Sapa remembers through his gloom and pain and blurred one-eyed vision and through memories not his own that
Tashunke-Witke
, Crazy Horse, had been called Curly Hair and then just Curly when he was young, before his father, Crazy Horse, gave his own name to his son.

But this garrulous old
psaloka
Crow looks nothing like the Crazy Horse Paha Sapa has seen several times this summer. The Lakota Crazy Horse–Curly is blade-nosed, scarred, thin-faced…. This old Crow’s face is pocked with smallpox scars but otherwise unscarred by battle and is as round as the moon.

But he won’t shut up with his continuous babble of bad Lakota mixed with lisping girl-man vocabulary. Maybe, Paha Sapa thinks through his pain, this old Crow is the kind of
winkte
who likes to fuck boys. Instinctively, reflexively, Paha Sapa gropes for the long knife at his belt.

It is gone. As is his belt. His breechclout is now held up by a piece of rope given to Curly by one of the soldiers. Paha Sapa’s feet are bare in the idiot stirrups.

If this Curly tries to fuck him, Paha Sapa decides, he will gouge out the old army scout’s eyes with his thumbs and chew off his ears.
But
, his bruised and mourning mind insists, somehow speaking in the
wasichu
babble voice of the ghost he swallowed less than two months earlier,
what if
all
the
wasichu
cavalry try to fuck him at once?

Paha Sapa once heard from Limps-a-Lot that
Tatonka Iyotake
Sitting Bull had said that it is possible for a real
wičasa wakan
to will himself to die… to will his own heart to stop.

Paha Sapa concentrates on that now, through his pain and absurd saddle-bouncing, but fails. Of course he cannot do it. He is not
wičasa wakan
and now never will be.

He is nothing at all.

Not even a captured warrior. Just a boy who has lost his tribe’s
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
and who should be dead but has failed even at that simple act.

Curly keeps talking all through the long, raining, bouncing, ass-sore, head-exploding, arm-aching, endless afternoon.

This detachment of
wasichu
cavalry was part of General Crook’s force of combined infantry and Fifth, Second, and Third Cavalry troopers that had broken off from General Terry’s column to head east to cut off the Sioux and Cheyenne who had scattered after Custer’s death on the Greasy Grass. Crook, champing at the bit (as Curly put it), had left his supply wagons behind weeks ago, taking along a mob of Shoshone scouts and a handful of Crow scouts such as Curly and his friends Three Weevils, Drinks from a Hoofprint, and Cuts Noses Off Frequently. Paha Sapa heard that a famous
wasichu
, a certain Buffalo Bill Cody, had returned from his Wild West Show back east to lead Crook’s column, but he wasn’t with this bunch.

The column was soon starving, unable to live off the land. They’d eaten all their packhorses, then shot and eaten many of their extra riding horses, and left hundreds of others behind. All a treasure to Crazy Horse and the other “hostiles” who are evidently trailing the cavalry that is supposed to be chasing them. Through his headache, Paha Sapa slowly understands why those Crow were on the warpath after him. The Great Plains north and east of the Black Hills have turned into an everyone-kills-everyone zone.

Five days earlier, when this full force tried to plod across the hills of mud that had been the Badlands, Crook sent this detachment of sixty-some men swinging south and east with the orders to scout for hostile braves and then meet up with Crook’s main column near the headwaters of the south fork of Grand River… near two landmarks called Slim
Buttes. This detachment, as hungry as the main column despite their swing south and east to the Black Hills and Bear Butte area where game was always plentiful, is at least three days late for that rendezvous.

Despite the pain, Paha Sapa is beginning to focus on the situation when the bouncing, wet-wool-reeking
wasichus
reach Slim Buttes, his own destination, late that afternoon.

The Crow scouts are sent in ahead, and Curly gestures angrily for “Bilé” on his slow horse to keep up. Paha Sapa is eager to get there and he kicks the lazy nag as hard as he can with his bare heels.

The four Crows and one Lakota boy ride into the familiar valley beneath the low, wooded hills, and Paha Sapa sees at once that there has been a battle. No… not a battle… a massacre.

Most of the tipis have been burned, but the few still standing show long knife slits where women, old men, children, and even terrified warriors cut their way out of the backs of the lodges in their panic. The entire valley stinks of ashes and human and horse shit, but much worse than that smell is the overwhelming stink of death.

The four Crow ride on. Paha Sapa slides off his horse at the first sign of familiar tipis and faces.

The only thing that gives him hope is that the few intact tipis here—or shreds of tipis—sport designs that look more like old Iron Plume’s
tiyospaye
rather than Angry Badger’s village. Many of the bodies here are burnt—looking too small ever to have been human beings of any age or size—but some are mutilated but otherwise intact, bloated and blackened by at least three days of late-summer sunlight and heat. Insects cover them. Animals and dogs—perhaps the dogs of this very
tiyospaye
—have been busy at them.

But some are still identifiable.

Paha Sapa sees Angry Badger himself, the little fat warrior’s corpse bloated to three times its normal size, lying on his back near the stream. His arms are raised as if in preparation to box. Paha Sapa somehow knows the gesture is only from a tightening of the muscles and tendons so visible where the dogs and coyotes and buzzards have been feasting. The bones of both forearms gleam white in the rainy gloom.

Farther on, where Limps-a-Lot usually set his lodge, Paha Sapa finds the blackened and knife-carved corpse of Three Buffalo Woman.
There is no doubt it is her, even though the
wasichus
cut off her large breasts. While most of her kind face is gone, he can still see the unhealed scars on her forearms and thighs where she cut strips of her own flesh to place in his
wasmuha
rattle for Paha Sapa’s
hanblečeya
only days ago.

Centuries ago.

Thirty feet away is another woman’s corpse with one leg and both arms missing, carried away, and the swollen, putrid face chewed off to the skull, eyes long taken, but her black hair, although pounded into the mud by the constant heavy rain, is still intact. It is Raven. Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife. Where Raven’s arms would have been is what is left of what was once an infant. Not hers, Paha Sapa knows. Possibly Loud Voice Hawk’s new baby by the selfish old
wičasa wakan’s
youngest wife, Still Sleeps. Paha Sapa can imagine Raven taking the child and attempting to save it, even during the madness of a full cavalry charge.

A few paces farther on, closer to the cottonwood trees, he finds an unburned corpse, facedown, face gone, whose bloated but somehow still-withered arms show the faded tattoos that Loud Voice Hawk was so proud of.

It looks as if everyone was killed here as Crook’s cavalry charged through, burning and shooting and chasing down warriors and women and children alike. The entire valley is churned up with the hoofprints of hundreds of cavalry horses and hundreds of ponies.

Beyond this point, all the tipis have been burned, all the bodies reduced to blackened bird bones and charred flake-flesh. One of them might be, must be, Limps-a-Lot. He would not flee and leave his wives behind. Or his friends.

The four Crow scouts come back as Paha Sapa is attempting to mount the hard-leather-saddled horse they gave him. Curly is holding a repeating rifle, stock against his thigh as he reins up. His pony is mud splattered from hoof to hindquarters. Even the oversized pony’s mane is matted and clotted with mud. Beyond him, the full detachment of cavalry has filled the valley and moved on along the ridge to the southeast.

—
Thinking of running, Bilé?

Paha Sapa has
not
thought of running and now he wonders why. As
if reading his aching mind, the old Crow laughs and says something in guttural Absaroke to the other three Crow scouts. They laugh. Curly spits and speaks again in his effeminate almost-Lakota.

—
It looks like General Crook and about a hundred and fifty cavalry from their main attachment did all this and finished their business with this village just a little ways beyond—there are more Sioux women’s and children’s bodies in the ravine just over that rise—and then the whole Fifth Infantry column arrived and bivouacked on a rise about a mile from here… oh… I’d say about three days ago, based on the state of the shit. But then the tracks show that about five hundred warriors arrived in a hurry from the south, your Sioux and Cheyenne both, most likely, based on the few corpses we found—the whole bunch almost certainly led by that bastard Crazy Horse—and while Crook’s cavalry must have outnumbered the hostiles at least four to one, that crazy bastard Crazy Horse attacked… the signs are clear on that… and then fell back to repel Crook’s counterattack. It looks like the tracks of the running fight continue on down the ridge for a couple of miles. Captain Shit-for-Brains here is pressing on to close up with Crook’s main column, but we’re sure that Crazy Horse is still out there somewhere, ready to pounce. Here, you may need this, Bilé.

The old Crow tosses Paha Sapa a long-barreled Colt revolver. The thing is heavier than Paha Sapa could have imagined, and just catching it makes his head and arm throb worse and almost pulls him off the scabbed horse. He straightens.

Curly is saying—

—
I don’t think Crook’s people have any supplies left and they didn’t have time to hunt before Crazy Horse’s bucks attacked, so even if we catch up to them they won’t have any food either and we… what the
fuck
are you doing, Bilé?

Paha Sapa is lifting the heavy revolver, holding it steady in both hands. He aims it at Curly’s fat, smug Crow face and pulls the heavy trigger three times.

The gun does not fire.

All four of the Crow scouts laugh until they’re ready to fall off their muddy ponies.

Curly digs in his vest and brings out his fist, opens it. Half a dozen cartridges gleam ever so slightly in the dying gray light. Rain beads on brass.

—
When you prove yourself, Bilé—or when Crazy Horse has us surrounded and we decide to shoot ourselves rather than become his captives—then you can have these.

The four Crows surround him, their Winchester rifles cocked on their hips or thighs, bandoliers across their scarred chests, pistols in their broad belts, and Paha Sapa’s slow horse labors and wheezes to keep up as they follow the main column southwest out of the valley and along the hoof-trampled ridge.

T
HEY MEET UP WITH
G
ENERAL
C
ROOK
and many hundreds of other men (Curly tells Paha Sapa that there are two thousand men in the main body), and do what they call “bivouacking”—since the
wasichus
are afraid to set up a real camp because of the presence of Crazy Horse and his warriors—which means hunkering down in the pouring rain with nothing but mud underneath them and their ponchos or rain gear over their heads, eating what little hardtack they have left (Curly gives Paha Sapa two bites), and trying to sleep while every fourth man takes turns holding the horses.

Paha Sapa now understands the word
infantry
, which Curly has used several times, not even attempting to put it into the Lakota language. Most of Crook’s men are foot soldiers. No wonder, he thinks, they were so willing to eat horses.

Eventually the grumbling and idle chatter and cursing and farting die down until there is only the sound of the heavy rain on two thousand and more slickers, the nicker of horses spooked by the
wasichus’
stink of fear, and then the snoring. Curly and his three Crow scouts fall asleep quickly, lying in the mud with their heads on wads of wet wool—their horses still saddled and held by one of the
wasichu
troopers ordered to hold the reins through the darkness and downpour. But although Paha Sapa is more tired than he’s ever been in his life, he does not even try to sleep.

He has to think.

Curly continued babbling at him right up to the second he started snoring loudly. Paha Sapa’s head aches almost as much from the new information he’s received in the past ten hours as from the rifle stock blow to his skull.

It seems that there are different tribes of
wasichus.
For some reason, young Paha Sapa, in his eleven summers, has never considered such a
thing, and none of the wise men in his life, including Limps-a-Lot, has ever mentioned it. But, through Curly’s effeminate gabbling, Paha Sapa knows it now and he thinks about this as he looks around on the hilltop at the hundreds upon hundreds of lumpish figures huddled under tarps and soaked blankets in the continuing rain.