Black Hills (5 page)

But then, three months before Paha Sapa was born, Short Elk—quite full of himself now, with six beautiful ponies to his name—had joined five older warriors on a raid on a large Pawnee village far to the west of the Black Hills. This raid was for ponies only, and Wolf Turning, the older warrior leading the raid, told the others that when they got
the ponies, they would ride hard and not stop to fight. But again Short Elk showed himself a hero. Disobeying Wolf Turning during the wild ride back across the plains, Short Elk had slid off his horse, driven a stake into the prairie, attached a ten-foot thong to the stake, and then wrapped the other end of the thong around his waist. The idea was that he would not move from that place. Short Elk cried to the other five Lakota—

—
They cannot harm me! I see the future. The Six Grandfathers watch over me! Join me, my friends!

The five older men pulled up their ponies but did not go back. They watched from a grassy hilltop two hundred broad paces away while fifty howling Pawnee rode Short Elk down and—in their anger at losing the ponies—leaped from their horses and cut the young, screaming warrior to pieces, gouging out his eyes while he lived and hacking off his arms, finally cutting his still-beating heart out of his body and taking turns biting into it. The five Lakota watching from the hilltop immediately left the stolen Pawnee horses behind and fled in terror across the prairie to their village.

Stands in Water had been in mourning—weeping, screaming, moaning, tearing at her hair, and slicing flesh from her forearms and thighs and upper arms and even from her breasts—for the full three months between Short Elk’s death and her baby’s birth.

Paha Sapa knew these things even when he was very young, not just because he had begun asking questions of his elders as soon as he could talk, but because of what he thought of as his
small-vision-backward-touching
.

Paha Sapa had used his
small-vision-backward-touching
since before he could speak or walk, and he was well into his running-around little-boy years before he realized that not everyone had the ability.

It did not always work. It usually did
not
work. But sometimes—and he could never predict when—the young Paha Sapa could touch another person’s skin and receive a jumble of memories and voices and sounds and visual images that were not his own. It took him far longer to learn how to sort out these brief, powerful floods of
other-thoughts
so that he could make sense of them than it took him to learn to speak or walk or ride a pony or shoot a bow.

He remembers that when he was about three summers old, he touched the bare arm of Raven’s Hair, Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife (and Paha Sapa’s wet nurse after his real mother died), and received a wave of confused memory-thoughts of Raven’s Hair’s own baby dying only weeks before Paha Sapa was born, of her anger at Limps-a-Lot for bringing this other infant into her lodge, of her strange anger at Stands in Water—Paha Sapa’s dead mother—for grieving so terribly after her stupid boy-husband’s death that she kept slashing her arms and thighs with her knife in mourning far beyond an appropriate amount of time for that sort of behavior, bleeding and weakening herself too much—especially if one is very small and with small hips and pregnant and not strong to begin with after a long captivity with the Crows, as Stands in Water had been.

At the age of three summers, Paha Sapa had seen through his
small-vision-touching
that his mother had come close to killing herself through this knife-slash mourning before he was born. Most Lakota women prided themselves on their relative ease of bearing children, feeling that
Wakan Tanka
—the All—had chosen them to be excused from at least a little of the pain and danger that afflicted all women everywhere. But at the age of three summers, touching Raven’s Hair, Paha Sapa had
seen
his young mother, pale and weak and sweating, her legs apart and her
šan
—her woman’s
winyaˇn shan
—open and ragged and bleeding, as Raven’s Hair and Three Buffalo Woman and the other women used moss and warm clay and even strips of hide softened to the thinness of cloth to try to stem that terrible bleeding, even while other women held him, squealing his lungs out and with his umbilical cord still attached.

Paha Sapa had cried out and staggered away from Raven’s Hair the day he had that touching-vision, and his stepmother—who had always treated him kindly, treated him almost as her real son—asked him what was wrong, what had happened, but Paha Sapa, at that age barely able to speak words in the language of the
Ikče Wičas´a
—the Natural Free Human Beings—had only cried and pulled away and been sick and feverish all that day and that night and all the next day.

After that, Paha Sapa both feared and wished for the
small-vision-backward-touchings
and slowly learned how to ask a question or direct a discussion to something he truly wanted to know about and then, as if
by accident, touch one or more people near him, hoping to get the rush of their memories and mind-pictures.

Sometimes the magic worked; usually it did not.

But it seemed a shameful thing to Paha Sapa—like peeking under a tent flap to see a young maiden undressing, or deliberately watching Limps-a-Lot mating with Raven’s Hair or his older wife, Three Buffalo Woman, on a warm night when the buffalo robes were thrown off—so he had not confessed his ability to his stepfather until he had reached his ninth summer, the year before the
Pehin Hanska Kasata
—the rubbing out of Long Hair at the Greasy Grass—that changed Paha Sapa’s life forever.

I
N HIS NINTH SUMMER
, when he tells Limps-a-Lot about his visions, the holy man asks Paha Sapa several sharp questions about his
small-vision-backward-touching
experiences, seeking out lies or inconsistencies—obviously thinking that the boy has heard these things in other ways (since there is no privacy whatsoever in a tipi and very, very little in a band with only eighteen lodges). But when Paha Sapa tells of his
small-vision-touching
experience with Three Buffalo Woman, in which she remembered her time as a girl when she was captive of the Blackfeet and all the men took turns raping her and then burned the insides of her thighs with white-hot stones, Limps-a-Lot falls silent and his frown is fierce. Paha Sapa knows through the same
small-vision-backward-touching
that Three Buffalo Woman has never told anyone except Limps-a-Lot of those days, and that only once, many years before when Limps-a-Lot suggested (while they were gathering berries near Beaver Creek) that they should marry. The two never discussed it again or mentioned it to anyone else.

Finally, Limps-a-Lot says—

—
Why do you call this ability
small-vision-backward-touching
and not visions from the spirits, Black Hills?

Paha Sapa hesitates. He has never lied to Limps-a-Lot, but he is afraid to answer honestly.

—
Because I know these—glimpses—are not my
hanblečeya,
Grandfather.

Paha Sapa only calls his guardian Limps-a-Lot
Tunkašila
—Grandfather—at the most formal or most affectionate moments.

—
You know that is not what I meant, Black Hills. I am asking why you call these small visions
backward
visions. Do you touch people and also see
forward
in their minds and in time… do you see what will happen to them, to us, in the future?

Paha Sapa hangs his head as if he’s been caught touching his
ce
.

—
Han, Tunkašila.
Yes, Grandfather.

—
Do you want to tell me what
small-visions-forward-touching
you have had with me and others in our band?

—
No, Grandfather.

Limps-a-Lot says nothing for a very long time. It is late summer, the week of Paha Sapa’s birth date, and the two have walked to a hill far enough away that the village lodges look like cloth girl-toy tipis under the cottonwood trees and the grazing horses across the river are mere black specks moving through the tan grass that rises to their bellies. Paha Sapa listens to the long, slow sibilance of the grass sighing and stirring in the breeze during Limps-a-Lot’s silence. He will hear that sound again ten months later at the Greasy Grass when the shooting and screaming stop.

—
Very well, then, Black Hills. You showed courage by telling me these things. I will not press you to tell me about the
small-vision-forward-touching
visions until you are ready—but do not hesitate to do so if you see something that is important to the survival of our people.

—
No
, Tunkašila.
I mean, yes, I will
, Tunkašila.

Limps-a-Lot grunts.

—
I will not tell Angry Badger or He Sweats or Loud Voice Hawk about your visions at this time. They already think you strange. But you and I should think about what this means for your
hanblečeya
in the Paha Sapa next year. Use this power carefully, Black Hills. Such a thing is
wakan.

Sacred. Filled with mysterious force.

—
Yes, Grandfather.

—
It does not mean that you
must
become a
wičasa wakan,
a holy man like me, but it
does
mean that you have been chosen by the Six Grandfathers to be a
waayatan,
a man of vision who can see the future, like my young cousin Black Elk or your father’s nephew in Good Thunder’s band, Hoka Ushte.
Waayatan
often give their tribes
wakinyanpi
that may determine the band’s fate.

—
Yes
, Tunkašila.

Limps-a-Lot frowns at him in silence and Paha Sapa knows, even without touching the old man and receiving a backward-vision, that the wise
wičasa wakan
thinks that he, Paha Sapa, is too young and too immature for this
wakan
gift and that this vision-touching power might be bad for everyone. Finally Limps-a-Lot growls—

—
Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin.

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

N
UMINOUS
.

Paha Sapa learns the meaning of this
wasichu
word in English some forty-five years after
Pehin Hanska Kasata
—the rubbing out of Long Hair Custer at the Greasy Grass—and fifty-six years after his birth.

Numinous
, the teacher and poet and historian Doane Robinson tells him, means everyday things charged and alive with spiritual or supernatural meaning surpassing all normal comprehension.

Paha Sapa almost laughs. He does not tell Mr. Robinson that his—Paha Sapa’s—life was
numinous
up until the time it was taken over by
wasichus
and the
Wasicun
world.

The world of his childhood was literally alive with unseen meaning and connections and miracles; even the stones had lives and stories. The trees held sacred secrets. The prairie grasses stirred with truths half heard in whispers from the spirits that surrounded him and his band of Natural Free Human Beings. The sun was as real a being as his honorary grandfather or the other men walking past him in the daylight; the stars over the plains shivered from the breath of the dead walking up there; and the mountains on the horizon watched and waited for him with their revelations.

Numinous.
Paha Sapa almost smiles when Doane Robinson teaches him that wonderful word.

But Paha Sapa’s childhood was not all mystical portent and magical
small-vision-backward-or-forward-touching
of other people’s memories or fates.

For most of his childhood, Paha Sapa was just a boy. Having no living parents was not a hardship for him—certainly not as large a problem as having such an odd name—since Lakota boys were not
taught, trained, punished, praised, and raised by their parents. All Lakota parents were benevolently uninvolved with their kids to the point of polite indifference. It was the other boys in the village who taught Paha Sapa almost everything he needed to know from the time he was old enough to toddle away from Raven’s Hair’s tit, including where to go outside the village to take a shit and which reeds or grasses it was safe to wipe his bottom with.