Black Hills (7 page)

For the first time, seeing the geological rut and rim surrounding the Black Hills from this height, Paha Sapa understands why Limps-a-Lot has called that long, depressed, hogback-ridged oval that surrounds the Black Hills the “Race Track,” because of a story of all the animals racing one another there back when the world was young. It does look like a track worn down by racing feet.

Paha Sapa also realizes why Limps-a-Lot and his people call the place
O’onakezin
, or Place of Shelter. The Black Hills, he sees, are the dark heart of the heart of this entire continent he can now see spreading away to either side until the haze near the curve of the horizon hides the details. It is the place where both animals and the Natural Free Human Beings can go to shelter when the winter winds howl too terribly on the plains and the game all disappears. This must be why Angry Badger and the other men also call the Black Hills the “Meat Pack.” Paha Sapa, floating easily on his belly with his arms wide while he looks down at the evening shadows outlining the high peaks, understands that there will always be game and shelter in the Black Hills for his people.

Then he sees something moving in the Black Hills—something gray and huge rising up out of the black trees as if new mountains were being born. They seem to be human forms, four of them, and from their size even at this distance, they must be hundreds of feet tall.

But he cannot make out details. Suddenly the peaceful feeling he’s had since lying on the ground is gone and his heart is pounding wildly, but he has the sense that the giants are pale
wasichus
—monster
Wasicun.

Then the huge, gray forms lie down again and pull the earth over them like blankets and are again covered and hidden by dark soil and darker trees.

Paha Sapa begins to settle earthward. He does so slowly, the rays from the setting sun painting him bright red—he vaguely wonders if those in the village are looking up at him—but he does so with a heart and spirit that remain perturbed and disturbed. He is not sure what he saw below, but he knows it is not a good thing.

Paha Sapa opens his eyes and he is lying on his back in the little clearing in the sagebrush. Somewhere a coyote calls. Or perhaps it is a Pawnee or Crow or Shoshoni warrior in a raiding party making ready to fall upon the village with bows and rifles and tomahawks.

Paha Sapa is too tired and disturbed to care. He gets to his feet slowly and begins trudging back to the village. The coyote is answered by several other coyotes. They are only coyotes.

The next year, when Paha Sapa confesses about his
small-vision-backward-touching
to Limps-a-Lot, he refuses to tell the details of the few times he has experienced
small-vision-forward-touching
because he has seen forward to people dying. He will not mention his
touch-the-earth-to-fly
times because he begins not to believe in them himself.

When he gets home, Three Buffalo Woman does beat him (but with no real intention to hurt) for getting his second-best deer-hide shirt bloody.

L
ibbie, my darling Libbie, my dearest Libbie, Libbie my love, my life, my everything, my Libbie—

I need you, my darling girl.

I have been lying here in the dark thinking of the time five weeks ago on May 17—was it only five weeks ago?—when I led the regiment out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on this mission. You will recall, my dearest, that the day started cold and foggy before sunrise. I had the men eat hardtack and bacon, just as they would for the next month on the trail. Then General Terry and I marched the men through the rising mists to the fort—you always tell me that you wonder why our frontier forts have no stockades, my love—and then around the parade ground in columns of four so as to reassure the anxious wives and families and troopers we were leaving behind.

But you were not left behind then, my darling girl, my love. The other officers had to bid farewell to their families outside the fort, but you rode along with us that day, along with my sister, Maggie, and my niece Emma. Do you remember as we passed Suds Row, the married enlisted men’s quarters, all the women holding their babies and toddlers and even older children up and out toward us as they wailed? It made me think of a Triumph where the Roman general has returned in glory, only a bizarrely reversed one in this case, before any battles, where the wives of perfectly healthy troopers decide they are widows and treat their babes like orphans.

We had more than seven hundred troopers in our line that day, thirty-one officers (most of them riding in the mass with you and me and Maggie and Emma),
forty-five scouts and guides, and those three extra companies of infantry with that artillery detachment of four guns that followed those first days as an escort. (Yes, perhaps I should not have turned down the two batteries of Gatling guns Terry wanted me to take—but I’m sure you remember, my dearest, how those damned guns had slowed us down so on previous patrols, frequently pulling horses and men down with them when they tumbled into ravines or creek beds. A good cavalry unit has to travel
light.
No, if I were to do it again, I would still leave the Gatling guns behind.)

What a sight the regiment and its escort must have been that morning. The column stretched for more than two miles. I know that the regimental band was playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and “Garry Owen”—all through the War I loved that latter song, but I confess that I have been growing weary of it in these later years, my dear—but you and I couldn’t really hear the music because of the clatter of our horses’ hooves, the rumble of the hundred and fifty wagons, and the constant bellowing of the herd of cattle we’d brought with us.

It did not matter.

None of that departure matters except what happened thirteen miles down the trail, when it was time for you to turn back to the fort. Do you remember? I know you do, my love. The memory of it is what woke me from my cold slumbers here.

The group of us, including Maggie and Emma and my striker, Private Burkham, and the paymaster’s old wagon with its small escort, rode back about half a mile behind the column for us to say our good-byes. You surprised me by dismounting and suggesting that we—just you and I—take a walk among the willows that rose along the river there. These were the only high trees and shrubs for many miles; all the rest, back to Fort Lincoln and forward to where we were headed, was flat, open prairie.

We’d walked less than fifty yards from Burkham and the wagon and the other women when you suddenly seized me and kissed me hard. You removed my hat and ran your hand over my short-cropped hair, smiling as you did so. You did not seem to miss what you always called my “lovely curly locks.” Then you took the flat of your hand and began rubbing me below my belt buckle.

“Libbie…” I said, glancing back over my shoulder and over the thick willows to where I could still see the heads of Maggie and Emma, since they had remained mounted.

“Hush,” you said.

And then you went to your knees, but not—I remember clearly—until you had swished out the skirt of your dress (you wore my favorite that day, the blue one
with the corn silk little flowers on it) and your petticoats so they would not be stained by the damp grass.

And then you unbuttoned my fly.

“Libbie…”

But I could say no more, my darling, for you had taken me into your soft hands and then into your mouth, and I forgot Burkham and the waiting wagons, forgot my sister and my niece, forgot even the seven hundred men and hundred and fifty wagons and hundreds of cattle with the regiment now leaving me behind.

I forgot everything except the stroking of your hands, the warmth of your mouth, the movement of your lips and tongue upon me.

I arched my head back once, but I did not close my eyes. The blue sky—it had turned into a hot May day after the early morning fog and mist—disturbed me somehow, as if the color were a portent. So I looked back down at you and what you were doing with me and to me.

I always look, my dearest love. You know that. You know everything about me. Any other woman doing such a thing—I have never known any other woman to do such a thing—would, I would think, look bizarre, absurd, perhaps obscene, but when you take me in your mouth like that with your head bobbing back and forth, your hands still moving on me, your lips and tongue rapacious, and your lovely eyes glancing up at me from time to time from under those beautiful lashes, there could be nothing bizarre, absurd, or obscene in the gift you are giving me, in the sort of love you are showing me. You are beautiful. It makes me excited this very second, here in the darkness, to think of you, your cheeks pink with the sun after that long day of riding and also pink with excitement, the top of your lovely head, the sunlight catching individual hairs on either side of the part, moving faster and faster.

When we were finished—it had only taken a minute, I know, but it was a minute of pure joy and pleasure before weeks of solitude and care and hardship for me—you removed the handkerchief you had brought, dipped it in the stream, cleaned me up, tucked me in, and set the buttons of my tough blue cavalry trousers to rights.

Then we went back and said our formal farewells in front of Burkham and the others. We both had tears in our eyes, but neither of us could keep from smiling, could we, my darling?

When the wagon and you and the other women were mere dots receding across the prairie, Burkham startled me by saying, “It’s hard, ain’t it, General?”

Again I wanted to smile, although I forced myself not to. Remembering that Burkham might be one of those interviewed by the press—several correspondents
came with us, you remember, and more waited in Bismark and elsewhere for every word of our punitive expedition—I put on my saddest, sternest face and said to him, “Private, a good soldier—and I have always been a good soldier, Burkham—has to serve two mistresses. While he’s loyal to one, the other must suffer.”

Burkham grunted, evidently not moved by my eloquence. He swung up onto his gelding and said, “Shall we get back to the other mistress, General, before the tail-end of it gets out of sight?”

L
ibbie, my darling girl. I know you do not mind my talking of such things with you, since I have written you so many letters filled with such intimate thoughts, and whispered them to you while we lay together naked. You have always been more open and generous with your passion than any other woman in the world.

Do you remember the time when I could no longer bear to be apart from you (and I had heard that cholera had broken out at Fort Leavenworth, where you were waiting), so I wrote you from my Republican River camp telling you to come at once to Fort Wallace, where my men would bring you to my camp on the Republican, but Pawnee Killer and the hostiles were swarming everywhere there in Kansas, and I realized, too late, that they would almost surely attack the rich wagon train you would be traveling in, so I ordered the men who would be picking you up to shoot you rather than let the Indians capture you—later, you told me that this was terribly sweet and that you took it as a sure sign of my undying love—but when the wagon train (which indeed had been attacked by five hundred or so Sioux and Cheyenne, right where Comstock, the guide whom the Indians call Medicine Bill, had predicted they would attack, but the hostiles were driven off) returned from Fort Wallace, there was no sign of you and I went half mad with worry and passion? I love you so much, my dear, sweet, darling little girl.

You will remember that they had sent Lieutenant Lyman Kidder out from Fort Sedgwick to find my column, and he and his ten men had dropped out of sight right in the territory between us and Fort Wallace where I had feared for your life. I called for a forced march to Fort Wallace—primarily out of concern for you, my dearest—and we found what was left of Kidder and his men, stripped and hacked and scattered all over a little hollow. Comstock explained to us what the tracks told—of how Kidder and his small party had tried to run, how Pawnee Killer and his band had caught them from the rear, run them down, shot them with arrows, then murdered and mutilated them. It was a July day, and the bodies and men’s
parts had been lying in that sun for days, and I took the lesson then—and shall never forget it—that when faced by any serious force of Indians, the thing to do is to stand and fight, using your far superior firepower to keep the savages out of arrow range. Kidder had galloped in panic for more than ten miles, and although our cavalry horses are faster than Indian ponies, the Indians are ingenious at swapping their tired mounts for fresh ones, and some of the Indian ponies simply never tire.