Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

But, if he tells this Crook the truth about where Crazy Horse is waiting, just beyond the citadel place where Lakota war parties looking for Crows so often camp, ten miles or so from here, Paha Sapa has no doubt that this General Crook and his two thousand men will attack Crazy Horse and his four hundred warriors. After all, isn’t this the reason Crook and all these men have marched and ridden more than four hundred miles through summer heat and this odd, endless summer rain—to find and punish and kill Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Cheyenne who killed Custer?

  And then, in that attack, Paha Sapa will ride near the front of the attack, with no weapons, slow horse and all. And then he will be cut down by Crazy Horse’s men’s bullets, even as Crook cuts down Crazy Horse and his followers.

  It is a good day to die.

  The general is speaking. Curly has said something. Paha Sapa looks at the old man inquisitively.

  —Gray Fox says—Where? Tell us!

  Paha Sapa tells them exactly where his memories of Crazy Horse’s memories from what is still Paha Sapa’s future tell him the warrior and his men are waiting. Just beyond the good camping place, less than ten miles to the northeast. Where the wooded hills begin, not far from the citadel camping place. Right where the rippled valleys begin running nothwest toward the Little Missouri River and northeast toward the Grand River.

  Curly translates all this. General Crook does not call for a map or talk to any of his aides. The tall man continues squinting down at Paha Sapa.

  Finally, as if making a decision, the wasichu warrior chief shouts two words in the In Glass language—

  —Mount up!

  YEARS AND DECADES LATER, Paha Sapa will consider telling the story of these days and hours to his wife, Rain, or to his son, Robert. He never does, of course. He never mentions a word of any of it.

  But he will compose some of the chaos of those days into a sort of sequence, and had he spoken of such personal things that he never would have spoken of, putting himself into the third person as was his mental habit, the explanation would have gone something like this:

  Paha Sapa’s eagerness to die that day actually did not have enough energy in it to be called “eagerness.” He was so tired, so hollow, so beaten, so lost, that he wanted others to take care of it for him.

  Decades later, he would hear others—whites and even many Indians from different tribes—say that Crazy Horse on his deathbed (and before that on the battlefield at Greasy Grass, where he had ridden against Custer) had shouted “Hokahey!” which, they said, meant “It is a good day to die!”

  Bullshit, thought Paha Sapa when he finally heard this (showing off some of his new In Glass wasichu vocabulary). Hokahey! in a battle meant “Follow me!” and could also mean “Line up!” as in a Sun Dance Ceremony, or, with someone dying, could mean “Stand solid, stand fast—there is more to follow.”

  It did not mean “It is a good day to die,” although this was said often enough by Lakota warriors. Having opened his mind to Crazy Horse’s memories, he had far too many incidents of the warrior saying that to his men or hearing someone else say it. But in Lakota that phrase would have been something like Anpetu waste’ kile mi!—and Paha Sapa did not have the energy to cry such a thing that day anyway.

  He had failed at his hanblečeya, receiving the worst Vision imaginable and not even succeeding in taking it to his tunkašila and the other holy men and warriors of his village before they were killed. He had lost his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  He had lost his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  He wanted to die that day and if he could trick this strange-whiskered General Crook and all his starving washichus and Shoshoni and Crow scouts into dying with him by leading them into an ambush of Crazy Horse’s, so much the better.

  Could the future be changed? Could Paha Sapa’s visions-forward be false… or at least be changed by someone, by him, who saw them ahead of time?

  If so, he hoped that Crazy Horse would also die this day, in battle, shot down by one of Crook’s two thousand soldiers or cavalry rather than by being bayoneted or shot twelve months hence—Crazy Horse’s future memories were confused—while in the disgraceful process of surrendering to this same small-eyed, large-whiskered wasichu general at the Red Cloud Agency.

  But the day dragged on much longer and more slowly than Paha Sapa could have imagined.

  Two hours’ or three hours’ ride meant eight hours and more marching for these starved, exhausted foot soldiers. Crook sent cavalry ahead, of course, including two of the Crow scouts—Curly and Drinks from a Hoofprint stayed behind to guard him—but even though they marched at the rainy September dawn, the main body didn’t come up to the natural citadel and amphitheater that Paha Sapa had in mind until midafternoon. Once there, Crook ordered a camp to be set up on the citadel—a natural outcropping with steeper, pine-topped crags on three sides. They started up cooking fires and buried one of the wounded who’d died in the jolting ambulance wagon that day.

  Paha Sapa was half sleeping in the saddle, too exhausted even to climb down from his slow horse, when there came the rifle crack of Winchesters.

  Crazy Horse had arrived.

  Later, Paha Sapa understood that the war chief had mustered about five hundred of the Cheyenne and Lakota who’d been camping nearby and who had been roused by word of Crook’s cavalry’s attacks on the Minneconjou, Sans Arcs, and Hunkpapa villages—mostly against Iron Plume’s tiyospaye—near Slim Buttes. Crazy Horse had waited in ambush right where Paha Sapa had “remembered” him being—just a mile or two beyond this citadel crag—but upon hearing that all of Crook’s army had been brought up, delivered to him, Crazy Horse attacked, even with the odds more than four to one against him.

  When he’d assembled his men, Paha Sapa realized, Crazy Horse had thought he’d be going into battle against only the 155 or so men under Captain Mills’s detachment—the wasichu cavalry who’d attacked and burned the Slim Buttes villages, including Angry Badger’s and Limps-a-Lot’s tiyospaye. But now Tashunke-Witke found himself confronted by Crook’s entire pursuing army. The heyoka attacked anyway.

  Crazy Horse had beaten and humiliated General Crook on the Rosebud and he tried the same strategy again here—a general charge to release Crook’s Indian captives and to stampede the horses and captured ponies.

  This time it did not work.

  Crook committed his whole force. With the cavalry protecting his exposed eastern flank, the general sent his infantry and hundreds of dismounted cavalry directly at the wooded hills from where Crazy Horse’s men were laying down a steady volley of fire.

  Paha Sapa and Curly rode forward into the smoke and confusion. This was worse than Greasy Grass, Paha Sapa thought as he watched wasichus and Indians running and falling and writhing and screaming. It was certainly worse for Crazy Horse.

  The range and accuracy of the infantry’s long rifles was what made the difference—what made this outcome so very different from Custer’s fate at Greasy Grass. The far right of Crazy Horse’s line was the first to give way. Paha Sapa and Curly rode with the few cavalry and scouts advancing with the wasichu as they took the string of hilltops, wreathed as they were with clouds of acrid-smelling gunsmoke. The rain had relented for a few hours, but the air was so hot and humid and thick that Paha Sapa’s new blue coat was plastered to his bare skin. The gunsmoke stung his one working eye.

  He actually saw Crazy Horse then—riding his white horse, naked except for his breechclout and single white feather, waving his rifle in the air and commanding his warriors to fall back in order.

  But as they fell back, Crook’s infantry continued advancing, the wasichu cavalry lunging and harassing Crazy Horse’s depleted band of warriors from both sides and the rear. For what seemed a long time that afternoon, the battle turned into a protracted, running duel with a no-man’s-land of bullets and arrows filling a five-hundred-yard gap between the lunging, firing, swearing mobs of red man and white.

  Paha Sapa and Curly had ridden to the left of the ma
in advance just as there came a wild, brave Lakota charge at the Third Cavalry position there. The Indians—many on foot, those on horseback in clumps and disordered groups—charged forward, firing their own repeater rifles, probing for a weak spot in the Third Cavalry’s dismounted defensive positions. Paha Sapa again was sure that it was Crazy Horse he saw riding back and forth through the thick smoke, urging on the attack, turning back Lakota who had turned to flee, always in the thick of the fiercest action.

  Paha Sapa used his bare heels to kick his slow horse into some sort of advance—an awkward, reluctant, clumsy canter—and the boy rode out into the killing zone between the charging Lakota and the firing Third Cavalry. He rode straight toward the half-seen Crazy Horse on the horizon. Paha Sapa dimly remembered the unloaded Colt revolver in his belt and now he drew the useless weapon and waved it in the air, the better to get the attention of the rifle- and pistol-firing Natural Free Human Beings ahead of him.

  The air was so thick with bullets that he could hear and feel them buzzing around him. It’s true what the warriors said around the village fire, he thought idiotically. Bullets sound like bees in the middle of a real battle.

  Paha Sapa was content. His only regret was that he had never composed his Death Song. But, he realized, he did not deserve a Death Song.

  He had lost Limps-a-Lot’s and his people’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  A bullet ripped through his sodden blue soldier coat under his arm but did not touch his skin. Another bullet plowed a shallow furrow in his upper thigh. A bullet struck the horn of the saddle, making his slow horse stagger and almost knocking Paha Sapa off the horse. The boy was certain, based on the sudden stab of pain, that a Lakota warrior had shot his balls off, but he stood in the stirrups and looked down, suddenly not so sanguine, and saw no blood. He rode on, waving his pistol and screaming at his fellow Lakota to kill him.

  Another bullet creased his skull just above the swollen lump where Curly had clubbed him the previous morning. It did not knock Paha Sapa out this time, and he blinked away the new blood and kicked at the ribs of the slow, lazy, but terrified horse.

  A bullet tore away part of his sleeve and the filthy bandage covering his earlier bullet wound from the Crows but did not touch him. Paha Sapa kept hearing buzzing, hissing noises and feeling his oversized blue coat leap up as if there were a strong breeze, but other than the new scratches on his brow and upper leg, nothing touched him.

  Paha Sapa would think of this hour fourteen years later when the Paiute prophet Wovoka promised all those who wore the Ghost Dance Shirt that bullets would not and could not touch them. Paha Sapa was wearing a flea-infested, sweat-and-wet-wool-stinking oversized dead wasichu soldier’s blue coat that day, but bullets would not and could not touch him.

  Crazy Horse and his surviving warriors were falling back. Crook’s infantry was cheering and charging and firing as they went, and the Third Cavalry was sweeping in from the left, shooting the Lakota wounded and stragglers alike, taking no prisoners.

  Paha Sapa’s scabbed, slow horse would move no farther. At first Paha Sapa thought it had been shot—how could anything that large not have been shot in that air so filled with flying lead?—but the nag was simply being stubborn in its terror and had stopped to graze there in the middle of the killing field.

  Paha Sapa kicked at the horse’s ribs and sawed and tugged at the reins until the stupid beast turned around and began plodding back toward the line of firing wasichu infantry and dismounted cavalry that had not yet charged. Paha Sapa was still brandishing his unloaded pistol, now hoping and expecting Crook’s soldiers to kill him.

  Instead, the wasichu soldiers raised their rifles and cheered. And then they came at Paha Sapa and the retreating Lakota, some running, some of the cavalry trying to mount their panicked horses, with horses and would-be riders whirling in confusion, all their hunger forgotten in their sudden bloodlust to get at the retreating Lakotas.

  Paha Sapa slumped in his bullet-shattered saddle and let the slow horse plod him back behind the lines. Finally the nag stopped to graze again, and Paha Sapa slid out of the saddle and landed on his ass, too weak and drained to stand.

  Soldiers milled around him. Suddenly Curly was there, face distorted as he jumped off his pony. The old Crow stood over Paha Sapa seated there in the mud, his forearms on his bare knees, and the scout raised and cocked his own Colt revolver.

  —Lakota Water Boy, Bilé, Three Weevils and Cuts Noses Off Frequently are dead, killed in this ambush you led us into.

  Paha Sapa looked up then. And smiled.

  —Good. I hope their corpses are already filled with maggots and that their spirits stay in the mud forever.

  Curly grunted and aimed his big pistol at Paha Sapa’s face.

  This way, then, O Six Grandfathers? All right. I am sorry I did not compose my Song.

  Horses slid to a stop, sending mud flying over Paha Sapa and the old Crow scout. It was General Crook, beaming through his idiot’s whiskers, and a cluster of officers and the guidon carrier. The general was babbling In Glass wasichu talk at Curly before his horse was to a full stop—no one seemed to notice the aimed pistol.

  Curly’s round, stupid face gaped up at the wasichu war leader for a full minute before the Crow lowered the pistol and eventually lowered the cocked hammer gently down.

  Then Crook and his men were gone.

  Curly laughed the laugh of the not quite sane. He spat in the mud and looked at the pistol in his hand.

  —Gray Fox says that he knows you, Billy with the Slow Horse, are really Lakota, not Crow, but he welcomes you to be his scout for as long as he, Crook, Gray Fox, commands soldiers and cavalry troopers. He says your courage…

  Curly’s face contorted as if the Crow were going to vomit, but he only spat again.

  —… he says he will never forget your courage today and only hopes his other scouts learn from it. Oh… and Gray Fox said to me that you are a skeleton and that if Drinks From a Hoofprint and I don’t feed you well and keep you alive, he will hang us both from the first stout tree he finds.

  Curly laughed that insane-man’s laugh again. Paha Sapa could only stare at him.

  THAT NIGHT Paha Sapa slept, in the rain with no blanket or tarp covering him, for eight hours. Before dawn the bugles blew and Paha Sapa looked forward to another battle.

  But no… despite the sound of continued shots between Crazy Horse’s warriors and a rear guard of cavalry and infantry commanded by Bear Coat, Captain Mills… and despite almost six months of searching for the Lakota warriors, two months of that time without any food except horseflesh, and with the two thousand men dedicated to revenge after Custer’s death… Crook was leaving the battlefield.

  They’d crossed a wagon trail used by miners headed for the Black Hills, and now Crook put 1,700 of his starving men on that trail. Crazy Horse and his warriors pursued, sniping from the rear and sides day after day, making feints at night, but Crook refused battle.

  Except for some two hundred Indian ponies and five thousand pounds of meat they’d stolen in the Indian camps they’d overrun at Slim Buttes, the long-wanted and long-awaited fight with Crazy Horse had shown no victory for Crook and his men. They’d come all the way from the center of Wyoming Territory, having left Fort Fetterman there on March 1 in a heavy snowstorm, and now, after all these months and miles… Crook kept refusing battle with Crazy Horse and the hostiles as the long column of men and horses staggered south into the Black Hills.

  Paha Sapa entered his sacred paha sapa again with a growing sense of disbelief and disconnection. These muddy wagon roads and the stinking mining town of Deadwood near where Crook’s depleted army finally came to a halt and camped had nothing to do with the Black Hills of Paha Sapa’s world. The hairy wasichus here were tearing into the heart of the living hills to find their gold, just as Paha Sapa’s Vision had shown him.

  General Crook was summoned off to Fort Laramie for a meeting with someone named General Sheridan.

  Curly and t
he other scouts now could beat Paha Sapa as much as they wanted, but they were still afraid to kill him.

  Paha Sapa, on the other hand, was free to run away… leave his stupid slow horse and infected blue coat, steal a real horse, and simply ride back out onto the Great Plains to find his people. He could have avoided Crazy Horse’s warriors and swung far west and then north to the white reaches of Grandmother’s Country to try to find Sitting Bull and other survivors he might know up there.

  He did not do that. He could not do that. He was without any people, without any family, without any tiyospaye of his own.

  He had led Crook’s army to Crazy Horse, and many Natural Free Human Being warriors had died that day.

  He had lost the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  When the survivors of the Starvation March lined up again and rode and marched behind Crook to Fort Robinson south of the Black Hills toward the Nebraska River, Paha Sapa—Billy Slow Horse—went with them.

  He was beginning to learn wasichu English—not In Glass—and the first word he learned from the troopers was useful, both noun and verb—fuck. Eventually that winter they trusted him with a knife, and he mastered the phrase “If you try it, I’ll cut your balls off. ”

  It was a long winter and spring and summer for Paha Sapa, and learning English meant that he now understood the lusty babblings of Long Hair’s ghost in his mind every night. And there was no longer any doubt that the ghost was Long Hair—Custer himself. Paha Sapa did his best to seal off the ghost and to mute the words.

  Paha Sapa was no longer with Crook and the Army on September 5 the next year—1877 as the wasichus counted years—when Crazy Horse came in to surrender and was bayoneted to death. He, Paha Sapa, had already seen that death too many times; he did not want to see it in person and he knew he could not change it.

  That August—in the Moon of the Ripening again, around his birthday and the first anniversary of his Vision—Paha Sapa had left the army and Fort Robinson quietly. No one chased him. Curly had died of appendicitis two months before and no one else paid any attention to the presence or absence of an eleven- or twelve-year-old Indian boy.