Black Hills: A Novel Read online

  —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.

  NUMINOUS.

  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.

  Lakota boys had few duties—other than watching over the grazing pony herd in the daytime when they grew old enough for that—and Paha Sapa played from early morning until after dark. After dark he sat at the campfire as long as Three Buffalo Woman or Limps-a-Lot would let him and listened to his elders there talk and tell stories in the glow of the fire.

  There were winter games and summer games for Paha Sapa to play. There were games with sticks and games with hide-wrapped balls and games with the river they almost always camped near and games with hands and games that involved horses. Most of the boy-games that Paha Sapa took part in involved shoving, pushing, the occasional fistfight, and more than occasional injuries. That was fine with Paha Sapa. He might not be training to be a warrior—he was, at that time, not sure yet—and did not spend much time thinking about whether he would be a wičasa wakan, a holy man, like his beloved tunkašila Limps-a-Lot, but he loved rough play and didn’t mind facing down even larger boys in a fight.

  A lot of the boy-games were war games—preparation—and one that Paha Sapa especially enjoyed was when the young boys, with a few older ones, would go off onto the prairie on their own and make their own boy-village, complete with grass tipis. And then they would plan their raid on the real village. The band would have an older-boy adviser, and that boy would send them off to steal some meat from the village of the big people. This was serious enough to be exciting, since the women—much less the warriors—would cuff and kick any boy found stealing meat.

  Paha Sapa and the others crawled on their bellies through the high grass, just as if they were attacking a Crow or Pawnee or Cheyenne or Blackfoot or Shoshoni village rather than their own, and then they had to creep up on the meat (buffalo tongue was the best) hanging to dry or waiting to be cooked—or even steal it from someone’s tipi—and then run away and get back to the boy-village without being caught or run down by an irritated warrior on his horse. Once back at their grass-tipi village, the boys would build their own fire and roast the meat while telling made-up stories of their bravery and their kills—kill-talks, the real warriors called such bragging—and often an older boy would hold the roasted and sizzling and dripping tongue on a stick, as high as he could hold it, and the younger boys would leap to bite off a piece. Those who could not leap high did not eat.

  All the boys had little bows made for them by their fathers or uncles or some friendly warrior, but the arrows had few feathers and had blunt knobs rather than stone- or steel-barbed points on the end. Still, they hurt when they struck, and the boys spent much time stalking one another in groups along the banks of the river or in the willow groves or out in the wind-moving high grass. Decades later, Paha Sapa remembers the excitement of those boy-hunts.

  When Paha Sapa got a little older—although he never grew very tall—he would join the oldest boys in their game called Throwing-Them-Off-Their-Horses. The boys were always naked when they played this game, and in many ways it was less of a game than a real battle without dead bodies at the end of it. They especially enjoyed playing it when there were several bands, most larger than Paha Sapa’s little band under their leader, Angry Badger, pitching their lodges together near Bear Butte or in one of the better sheltered valleys.

  The boys would group themselves in various teams, smear their naked bodies with berry juice, clay, and other stains approximating warrior paint, and then line their horses up and charge at one another, coming together with many shouts and yells and the crashing of rearing, screaming horses in the dust. The naked boys would seize one another and tug and pull and shove and elbow and strike out with their fists. When a boy fell to the ground, he was dead and had to stay dead. The last boy still on his horse was the winner of the battle and could tell his kill-stories around the boy-fires that night.

  Sometimes Paha Sapa stayed on his horse during Throwing-Them-Off-Their-Horses, but more often—because he was short and slim—he was thrown heavily to the ground, once landing on a prickly pear bush. Three Buffalo Woman had spent hours that night carefully pulling thorns out of Paha Sapa’s legs and back and belly and backside, while Limps-a-Lot smoked his regular smoking pipe and chuckled from time to time. The next morning, Paha Sapa went out to play the game again, although he did try to sit lightly on the horse’s bare back, since his equally bare butt was sore and swollen.

  There were other summer games like Ta-hu-ka-can-kle-ska, between the boys, ball games with balls made of scraps of buckskin wound into a wad and covered with more buckskin sewn together by sinew. Later, when Paha Sapa is playing on the Keystone baseball team that Gutzon Borglum has his men join each summer, competing with all the surrounding South Dakota towns and clubs—sometimes Borglum hires men to work on carving Mount Rushmore specifically because they are good at baseball—Paha Sapa often thinks of the
small, hard hide Ta-hu-ka-can-kle-ska balls of his childhood. They were hit with specially prepared ash sticks—and hit while the boy was running—and the Ta-hu-ka-can-kle-ska balls were very hard and lasted as long as or longer than the Wilson and Rawlings hardballs that Borglum’s baseball team plays tournaments with.

  Both the boys and girls in Paha Sapa’s band had as many games to play in the winter as they did in summer. Many of these were sticks-sliding-on-ice-or-snow games like Hu-ta-na-cu-te for the boys or Pte-hes-te or Pa-slo-han-pi for the girls. Sometimes when there were hills nearby, the older boys made sleds—called can-wo-slo-han—from the rib cages of buffalo or elk, with runners made from bone, and sometimes the boys allowed the girls to ride downhill or along the frozen river with them in their can-wo-slo-han.

  During the many days and even weeks in winter when the hours of daylight were short and the weather was too snowy or blowing or cold to spend much time outside except for necessary duties, there were inside-the-tipi games that Paha Sapa and the others could play, such as ta-si-ha, where the game toy was made from the ankle bones of a deer and then strung on a buckskin string, narrow end down. At the end of that string, they tied little bones together. Paha Sapa remembers that they used about eight of these ta-si-ha bones in the game and that the other end of the buckskin string was tied to an eagle’s wing.

  When the boys and girls played together, they would take turns holding the eagle wing bone in their right hand and the tassel in their left, swinging the ankle bones out in front of them. If the other player managed to catch the first bone, the play went on. If he or she missed, they passed the ta-si-ha to the next person in line. Paha Sapa was very good at this game; his hands were fast and his eyes were good. After catching that first bone ten times, the teams would start on the second, third, and so forth, until all ten players would have caught the tassel. Other inside-the-tipi games, Paha Sapa remembers, included i-ca-sio-he, a sort of marbles game—although the marbles were almost perfectly round stones, which were hard to find. The boys prayed to the Six Grandfathers and to Wakan Tanka himself to help them find perfectly round i-ca-sio-he stones, and they were always found.

  It was a silly game called istokikicastakapi that led to Paha Sapa’s discovering his touch-the-earth-to-fly ability.

  HE IS SEVEN SUMMERS and playing istokikicastakapi with a group of the younger boys, most his age or younger. The game consists of chewing rosebush berries, spitting the pits into your hand, and then wheeling to throw the pits into someone’s face before he can duck or escape.

  There is an obnoxious boy just Paha Sapa’s age playing that day named Fat Frog—and the name is appropriate, for besides being fat he is a takoja, a pampered and spoiled grandson of the lazy old man named Feet in the Fire—and while they are running in their circle near the creek and playing istokikicastakapi, Fat Frog grabs Paha Sapa, pulls his head close, and spits in his face. There are almost no rosebush berry pits, just spit. Curds and slimy trails of Fat Frog spit all over Paha Sapa’s face.

  Paha Sapa does not wait to think; he balls his fist and strikes Fat Frog square in the middle of his fat face, bloodying his nose and knocking the boy backward into a prickly pear. Fat Frog screams and calls to his three older cousins standing nearby, boys who also live in Feet in the Fire’s lazy lodge, and the three older boys leap on Paha Sapa and strike him with their fists and feet and with willow branches, all while Fat Frog is screaming and holding his bleeding nose and crying that Paha Sapa broke it and that he’s going to tell his grandfather, and Feet in the Fire will come find Paha Sapa and kill him with the knife that Feet in the Fire used to scalp ten wasichus.

  When the three larger cousins are finished beating on Paha Sapa, they kick him in the ribs once or twice and go away. Paha Sapa lies there hurting, but he has no impulse to cry. It is all too funny, especially the image of old, fat Feet in the Fire chasing him with a scalping knife. He only hopes that he did break Fat Frog’s nose.

  When he gets up and dusts himself off, Paha Sapa realizes that he has got blood—mostly his own, he thinks—spattered down the front of his second-best deerskin shirt. Three Buffalo Woman will beat him for sure when he goes back to the lodge.

  Paha Sapa only shakes his head—still amused—and limps away from the village, wanting to be alone for a while.

  A little over a mile from the village, out of sight of all the tipis and even of the horses and the boys and men who guard them, Paha Sapa comes to a low, wide area where for some reason the prairie grasses are low, almost like what he will someday learn is called a “lawn.” Paha Sapa lies down on this soft grass and soft dirt and kicks off his han’pa—his moccasins.

  He lies there on his back with his arms spread wide, the soles of his feet turned down hard against the evening-cooling soil, and his curving, clinging toes—his siphas—curling hard into the dirt.

  Paha Sapa almost closes his eyes, squinting through what seem like tears even though he has not been crying, and looks up at a paling evening sky of a deep blue that seems disturbingly familiar to the boy. He relaxes completely—first loosening the muscles in his tensed neck, then letting his arms go limp, then releasing the pressure on his curving fingers and clawing toes, then uncoiling something deep inside his belly. For some reason he cries out Hokahey! as if he is a warrior riding into battle.

  What happens next is very difficult for him to describe later, even to himself. He will not tell his beloved tunkašila Limps-a-Lot about his touch-the-earth-to-fly experiences until several more years have passed.

  Paha Sapa senses the earth spinning as if it were a ball instead of a flat thing. He sees the stars wheeling in the evening sky even though the stars have not yet come out. He hears the song the setting sun is singing and can hear the answering song the grasses and plants are singing back to it as the light begins to fade. Then Paha Sapa feels his body grow cold and heavy and distant from him even as he—the spirit-self Paha Sapa—becomes more and more buoyant. Then his spirit-self floats up out of his body and away from the earth.

  He rises for many minutes before he thinks to roll over onto his stomach in midair and look down. He is so high that he cannot see his body that he left behind, so high that the village is only barely visible as a scattering of tan tipis under tiny trees along a river receding from sight. Paha Sapa rolls onto his back again and continues to rise, higher yet, rising past the few scattered clouds showing pink now in the low rays of the setting sun, and then he is higher than all the clouds.

  He looks and rolls over again. The sky above him grows black even as the clouds so far below begin to glow pinker and the shadows on the earth grow longer. Paha Sapa knows that it is terribly cold just outside his spirit-skin—colder than any winter air that has ever touched him—just as he knows that the air up here is too thin to breathe, but none of that affects his spirit-body and spirit-self. He ceases rising when the sky is black all around and when the stars are burning above the blue blanket of air below, and he looks down with eyes suddenly grown as sharp as an eagle’s.

  What he sees on that round earth—he can plainly see the horizon curving from where he silently floats—are the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. The Black Hills are an oval between the Belle Fourche River to the north and the Cheyenne River, where the actual tribes of Cheyenne, driven out of the Black Hills and northern plains by the Sioux a century earlier, still live and hunt. The Black Hills, Paha Sapa now sees, are an oval inland island that he will later learn constitutes about forty-five hundred square miles of dark trees and hills, all enclosed by an almost sexual oval ridge of red sandstone that sets the hills off dramatically from the tan and dull green of the endless sagebrush prairie surrounding them. The Black Hills look like a woman’s winyaˇn shan, with pink, open lips. Or perhaps like a heart.

  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 s
tory 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.