Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (11 page)

When he went inside, Her Holy Door glanced up, then went back to her quillwork. But she was not going to let the opportunity to instruct him pass unremarked. “You should have done that a long time ago,” she said.

He looked at his mother curiously. “Done what, made a fool of myself in front of the whole village?”

“You didn’t make a fool of yourself—or no more so than anyone else, anyway. Your father was no more accomplished at courting than you seem to be, but we managed to find each other. If Light Hair is meant for you, it will work out. At least now she knows you are interested.”

Sitting Bull walked over to sit beside his mother. “You think so?” he asked.

She nodded. “I know so.”

“Do you think she is a good match for me?”

“That is not for me to decide.”

“But what do you think?”

“I think she comes from a good family. She is pretty, she is strong, and she will keep you in line. From where I sit, you could do a lot worse than Light Hair.”

“Then I will have her.”

His mother laughed. “It is not that easy. The question is not whether you will have her, but whether she will have you. She knows what she wants, and if she wants you,
then
you will have her. You are not the only young man in the village who has an eye on her.”

“Who else?” he asked, sitting a little taller. “Who else?”

Her Holy Door shrugged. “I don’t know all their names. But if you want her, you had better let her know it … and soon. She won’t wait forever for you to find your nerve.”

Sitting Bull took the warning to heart, and six weeks later he and Light Hair were married. To celebrate the wedding, they went off alone on a hunting trip. It was a strange experience for Sitting Bull. He had spent twenty years in Jumping Bull’s lodge. He had hunted for his family and for those in the village who could not provide for themselves. Now he was standing on another threshold. He had taken the step, but realized it was going to be a while before he understood its full implications.

Getting away by themselves was a good way to begin. He had his own lodge now, with Light Hair there to share it with him. Someday there would be children, and he could do for them what Jumping
Bull had done for him. His new life was going to take some getting used to.

On the second day away from the main village, they encountered a small herd of buffalo, and Sitting Bull brought two down. He and Light Hair butchered the animals together, and it seemed like a perfect beginning to what they both hoped would be a lasting thing. Jumping Bull and Her Holy Door had been together for more winters than Sitting Bull had been alive, and the match seemed ideal. He could only hope that his own would be as successful.

Two days later, while moving their lodge, they spooked some deer, and Sitting Bull again turned hunter, dropping a big buck this time. Once more they butchered their kill, and it was obvious they were already beginning to work well together. Sitting there on a hill that night overlooking their lodge, they talked about what it would be like to grow old together. Sitting Bull was finding it harder to ignore the reality of age now that Jumping Bull and Four Horns were getting on in years.

As a young man you took your elders for granted in some ways. It wasn’t that you didn’t respect them for what they had accomplished or what they knew. Lakota culture was based on reverence for the old, for their contributions in the past, and their ability to continue to contribute in the future. If you thought about it all, and as the descendent of holy men and medicine men Sitting Bull thought about it more than most, you realized that your elders had made everything possible. It wasn’t a long leap from there to understanding
that by fulfilling your responsibilities now, you were continuing that tradition, making it possible for those who would come after you to experience the same things you had experienced.

But there was another way in which you never thought of the old as anything but old. It was as if they had always been there, the wrinkled skin never smooth, the gray hair never blue-black, shining in the sunlight, the flesh on the arms thick with muscle, corded with tendon, instead of slack and soft, the way it looked now. It was hard to think that the same thing would happen to your own body, assuming you lived long enough for aging to take its normal course.

It was easier sometimes not to think about such things. It was easier to lie back in the grass, knowing that your lodge was warm and dry, that you had food, and that everything you needed was out there, if only you had the strength to get it.

Wrapping his arms around Light Hair, he tried not to think at all. It was better to savor the moment, thinking only about the two of them, being young forever and then one day simply vanishing from the face of the earth. There would be no slack skin, gray hair, or aching joints. They would be there one day and gone the next.

They watched the stars and whispered, enjoying the smell of the flowers surrounding them in the dark and the scent of crushed grass beneath them. High above, the stars were cold white points against a blue-black sky, you knew there were things you did not understand and could not control. But as long as they stayed where they
were and you stayed where you were, it didn’t matter.

They slept on the hill that night, not intending to, just dozing off peacefully in each other’s arms.

The next day they moved their lodge again. It was already beginning to be old hat, as if it were a thing they had always done, but somehow it was exciting and new, too.

That evening, camped along a creek, the lodge up against some cottonwoods, Light Hair made some broth from the deer. She used a horn spoon to skim some of the fat from the boiling liquid. Sitting Bull was sitting across from her, watching everything she did as if it were something no one had ever done before. He saw her freeze and he tensed, instinctively realizing that something was wrong.

Reflected in the slick grease in the spoon, Light Hair could see a cottonwood limb through the smoke hole at the top of the lodge. In the center was the face of a Crow warrior, staring down at her. She whispered to Sitting Bull, “Don’t look up, don’t even move.”

Without waiting for an explanation, he reached for his bow and quiver, sliding an arrow out with his fingertips.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“There is a Crow looking down at us from the top of the lodge.” He started to move, but she hissed, “Stay there; don’t let on that we know he’s there.”

Sitting Bull notched the arrow and in one swift movement drew it full and let it fly through the
smoke hole. They heard a thud and Sitting Bull ran for the entrance, already notching a second arrow.

Outside, on the grass under the trees, he found smears of blood. He knew he’d hit the Crow, but did not know how badly. Nor did he know whether the Crow was alone or had been scouting for a larger party.

They broke the lodge down and packed hurriedly, deciding that it would be best to return to the main village. If there were Crows in the area, they could not afford to be out alone.

As they headed home, Light Hair complained that their time alone had been too short, but Sitting Bull reached over to pat her on the thigh. “We have all the time in the world, winter after winter, stretching out ahead of us until we are both too old to remember this time.”

Little Missouri River
1856

I
T WAS JUNE, THE TIME THE LAKOTA
called the moon of the chokecherries, and Sitting Bull was coming to the end of a long preparation. He had wanted for as long as he could remember to become
wichasa wakan,
a holy man, like his father and his uncle Four Horns. But this was not a thing one willed. It took long preparation, intensive study with one who already was
wichasa wakan,
and dedication. He had prepared, studying with his father and his uncle and with Black Moon, and he was ready.

But there was one final step to be taken. One could not become a holy man without having danced the sun dance, and this too took preparation. In the fall of 1855, he had told Black Moon that he wanted to dance at the next sun dance, and the holy man had nodded. “It is time,” he agreed. So once more Sitting Bull had begun to prepare
himself for an ordeal that was a centerpiece of the Lakota religion.

Sitting Bull had undergone his vision quest, which was personal, but the sun dance was larger than any one warrior. It was tribal, in a way doing for the whole people what the vision quest accomplished for the individual. Only courageous warriors danced, and even some of them were not equal to the excruciating ordeal—especially if they chose one of the four most difficult dances of the six forms. Sitting Bull, as was his wont, intended to dance the most challenging of all.

When they camped on the Little Missouri in early June, the preparation began in earnest. This was a special time, a time when things were not as they usually were. As a
heyoka,
Sitting Bull was used to things being strange. After all, the
heyoka
sometimes did things backwards, crying when they were happy, laughing when they were sad. And to be
heyoka,
you were already marked as someone special. Only one who had had a vision of the thunderbird could become
heyoka,
and this Sitting Bull had done.

Now he was ready for the most demanding challenge he had yet faced. The sun dance was complicated, and the rules were rigid. As the most important and sacred ritual in Lakota religion, it was the most narrowly circumscribed and carefully observed. No one dared to change anything, or deviate in any way from the prescribed rules.

The first four days of the sun dance were given over to general celebration. Even though dancers might be dancing for personal reasons—

in fulfillment of a vow, in a request for something only the gods could deliver, perhaps in thanks for a favor granted or supplication for a life spared—the celebration was general. More than any other single aspect of Lakota life, even the buffalo hunt, it united all the people in one single undertaking. After the four days of celebration, those designated for the dance were separated from the rest of the people for more instruction. They stayed in a sacred lodge with the shamans who had been instructing them. One holy man had overall responsibility for the entire dance and the twelve days of ritual, and in 1856, the honor fell to Black Moon.

When the dancers had been given their last-minute instructions, once more isolated themselves for a vision, and purified themselves in the sweat lodge, they were ready.

A hunter was dispatched to look for the centerpiece, a forked cottonwood tree that would represent an enemy at first and then, for a period of four days, would be the very center of the Lakota universe. The tree had to conform to precise specifications. Once it was found it was marked, and only chaste women were allowed to participate in its felling. It was a special honor to be chosen as the one to deliver the last few blows of the ax, the ones that actually brought the cottonwood down.

Then part of the bark was peeled back, baring the wood to a point just below the fork. Some of the branches were stripped and the fallen tree was carried to the center of the dance lodge, which was not like other lodges. The warriors who carried it
used sticks, because only shamans were allowed to touch so sacred a thing. The tree was painted four different colors—red, blue, green, and yellow—representing each of the four winds—west, north, east, and south. Medicine bundles containing tobacco, an arrow for successful hunting, and other items of significance were attached, and the pole was tipped into a hole already prepared for it and raised upright.

Also attached to it were thick thongs which would be used in the dance. For the form Sitting Bull had chosen, four pairs of parallel incisions had to be made, two each in his chest and back, and wooden skewers inserted under the flaps of skin and muscle. Thongs were then attached to the skewers. Another part of the sacrifice in Sitting Bull’s chosen form was the offering of pieces of flesh. To make this offering, an awl was used to raise small bits of flesh, which were then severed with a sharp knife. Men could offer anywhere from twenty to two hundred pieces, and Sitting Bull chose one hundred to be taken from his arms.

As the incisions were made and the pieces of flesh sliced away, the blood that continually seeped from the ritual wounds was wiped away with sweet grass. When he was finally prepared, the next step was to hang suspended from the thongs, which were weighted on the other end by buffalo skulls. As he dangled there, staring at the sun through the open roof of the lodge, he continued to bleed.

Again and again, he cried out in supplication to the unseen. “Give good health to my people. Bring
the buffalo to feed my people.” Endless variations on the same theme, a prayer uttered over and over. Hanging there suspended, the skewers tearing at the muscle, he heard words from his past, saw things that he had forgotten.

He remembered the time the yellowhammer had awakened him from a careless nap to find a grizzly bear standing over him. He remembered how he had frozen, lying there as if dead, his eyes open, staring up at the huge bear, its claws dangling over him. Even now he could smell the stink of the bear and feel the drip of saliva from its gaping jaws. His memory of the bear’s breathing beat like a drum in his ears, mingling with the drums from the ceremonial musicians, a steady pulse that seemed to reach back in time beyond him, beyond Jumping Bull, beyond his grandfather—reaching back all the way to the time when the first Lakota stood alone on a hilltop looking out over the sacred land of the Paha Sapa.

It was a rhythm older than life, more insistent than a beating heart. He felt his own heart hammer against his chest. The sun seemed to grow larger and larger, as if it were descending on the lodge, threatening to incinerate him. The whole sky turned brilliant yellow, then white as the blue was swallowed by the expanding sun. He felt the trickle of blood over his chest and back, smelled the sweetness of it mingling with the salty sourness of the sweat that soaked his hair and ran into the cuts, stinging like a thousand bees.