Black Hills (30 page)

Paha Sapa realizes that the Six Grandfathers have given him the
wanblí
keen vision of the eagle. When Paha Sapa looks to the southern wooded hills of the Black Hills, he can clearly see the opening of
Washu Niya
, “the Breathing Cave,” that sacred place that the unseeing
wasichus
call “Wind Cave.” He watches now with his
wanblí
vision as the first buffalo emerge into the light.

Paha Sapa laughs aloud, and that happy sound is louder than his weak
nagi
voice. Limps-a-Lot and Sitting Bull and the other
wičasa wakan
were right in their how-it-started stories! The first buffalo are tiny, hardly larger than ants, and just as numerous. But the rich, still birth-wet grasses in the Black Hills and wider great plains beyond soon allow the tiny bison to grow to full buffalo height and mass. Again, Paha Sapa laughs aloud. The Six Grandfathers are showing him aeons of time in these few minutes.

The sun rises higher, and now even the shadows of the bison grazing in herds on the endless windswept plains north and south of the Hills leap out in bold relief.

Paha Sapa looks south again.

The First Men crawl blinking from the Breathing Cave, rise on their hind legs, and immediately send up prayers to
Wakan Tanka
, to the Six Grandfathers, to the other spirits, and to the gift of Mystery itself, giving thanks for being led up out of the darkness into this new world so rich with game and alive with whispering, guarding, and sometimes wonderfully dangerous spirits.

Generations and centuries pass in minutes as Paha Sapa watches his people be born, hunt, marry, wander far, fight, worship, grow old, and die. He watches them hunt animals he has never seen or heard of before—great hairy, tusked beasts—and watches as the Natural Free Human Beings receive the gift of
šunkcincala
, the “sacred dog” miracle of the horse. He watches as his people spread far across the plains.

Once again Paha Sapa is able to see the Black Hills as the heart-shaped center of the endless green-and-brown prairies of the
obleyaya dosho
, the wideness of the world. Once again he sees the Black Hills as the entire continent’s
wamakaognaka e’cantge
, the heart of everything that is. More than ever before, Paha Sapa sees the Black Hills as the
O’onakezin
, the Place of Shelter.

He can see the Sun Dance River to the north of the Hills, what the
wasichus
call the Belle Fourche, and the Cheyenne River to the south. Farther to the north he can easily see the meandering line the
wasichus
call the Missouri River. All of these rivers are in flood stage, but the Sun Dance River the most so.

In the distance Paha Sapa can see
Wapiye Olaye I’ha
, the Plain of the Rocks that Heal, and the
Hinyankagapa
Black Buttes and the
He Ska
White Buttes and the
Re Sla
Bald Place and back again to the
Washu Niya
Breathing Cave in the southern part of the Hills and half a hundred landmarks in the Hills and out that would take him days or weeks of walking or riding to reach.

He can see the Hogback Ridge of reddish sandstone that borders the sunken Race Track around the Hills, like a band of muscle around a pumping heart, and can easily see the broad
Pte Tali Yapa
“Buffalo Gap” that allows easy access both for the four-legged animals and for the Natural Free Human Beings when they go to the mountains for sanctuary. Directly beneath him is the Six Grandfathers, nearby the higher rocky summit of Evil Spirit Hill and half a hundred other gray-granite ridges and red-rock needles and spires thrusting up out of the soft black carpet of pines that covers the Hills.

It is silent up here as the sun rises quickly again and again, far too quickly to be in the harness of regular time or motion, and the shadows grow shorter so quickly as to be amusing. Again and again the sun hurtles into the sky, arcs across the perfect blue, and sets to the prayers of the Natural Free Human Beings. But suddenly that motion slows and there comes the wind-whisper, branch-murmuring, distant-thunder careful enunciation of the soft Grandfather voice in Paha Sapa’s mind. The eleven-year-old boy suddenly feels as if he is in his and his people’s future.

—
Watch, Paha Sapa.

Paha Sapa watches and at first sees nothing. But then he realizes that there is a stirring and shifting among and within the rocks of the sacred Six Grandfathers mountain a mile or two directly beneath him, a trembling and vibration along the rocky ridge summit where he can still make out his muddy Vision Pit and his five direction posts with their wilting red banners. Paha Sapa’s enhanced eagle-vision allows him to focus on things at will, almost as if he has one of the
Wasicun
cavalry officer’s telescopes he’s heard Limps-a-Lot describe, and now, as one of the Grandfathers points again, he looks more closely at the mountain from whence he came.

Small rocks and midsized boulders are shaking loose and sliding
down the steep southern face of the Six Grandfathers Mountain. Paha Sapa sees the trees on the northern slope shake and shiver in unison. There rises a soft rumble as more rocks, large and small, tumble into the deeper valley on the south side of the sacred peak, and then Paha Sapa sees the earthquake in action as the very rock seems to become liquid, shimmering, and mile after mile of forest and meadow fold and rearrange themselves like a buffalo robe or furry blanket being shaken.

No, something is coming
out
of the stone.

For a moment, Paha Sapa thinks it is something erupting from the rock itself, burrowing up
out
of the stone, but then he swoops his vision closer and sees that it is the granite of the mountain itself that is reshaping, re-forming, emerging.

Four giant faces emerge from the south-facing cliff just beneath where Paha Sapa has been praying and lying for days and nights. They are
wasichu
faces, all male—although the first face to come out of the rock might be that of an old woman except for the bold thrust of chin. The second face to emerge from the granite cliff like a baby bird’s beak and head from a thick-shelled gray egg is of a
Wasicun
with long hair, an even longer chin than the old-lady
Wasicun
on the far left, and a far gaze. He is looking up at Paha Sapa and the real Six Grandfathers. The third Head has a sort of goat beard that some
Wasicun
affect, but strong features and infinitely sad eyes. The fourth and final head, set between the far-looker and the goat-bearded sad man, has a short mustache above smiling lips, and around the eyes are two circles of what might be metal and glass. Limps-a-Lot has talked, rather wistfully Paha Sapa thought, of these third and fourth eyes that some
wasichus
put on when their own eyes begin to wear out; he has even given the
Wasicun
word for them:
spectacles
.

—
What…

Paha Sapa has to ask the significance of these frightening heads, no matter how puny his
nagi
voice sounds to his own ears.

Paha Sapa silences himself when he feels the phantom touch of an invisible Grandfather hand on his spirit-shoulder as the mountain below continues to change.

The four heads are free. Then, in a way strangely familiar to Paha Sapa from earlier dreams, come the shoulders and upper bodies, clad in granite hints of
wasichu
clothing. Now the four forms writhe and twist—Paha Sapa can almost hear the grunting from exertion and
can
hear the rumble of boulders falling into the valleys and the flap and cry as thousands of birds throughout the Black Hills take wing.

The heads must be fifty or sixty feet tall. The stone bodies, when they rise from their fetal crouches, balance, and stand, must be more than three hundred feet tall—taller than the spirit Six Grandfathers in their columns of white light.

For a moment Paha Sapa is terrified. Will these gray stone
wasichu
monsters continue growing until they can reach the Grandfathers and him? Will they reach up and pluck him out of the sky and devour him?

The stone
Wasicun
do not continue growing and do not look up at Paha Sapa or the Grandfathers again. Their attention is on the earth and on the Black Hills all around them. The giants stand there on their massive gray stone legs, two of them are actually astride the peak of the Six Grandfathers, and Paha Sapa can see them looking around with what he interprets as the same sense of wonder held by any newborn, four-legged or human.

But there is more than wonder in those four gazes. There is hunger.

Again comes the wind-pine-rustle, distant-summer-thunder whisper of one—or perhaps all—of Paha Sapa’s beloved Six Grandfathers.

—
Watch.

The four
Wasichu
Stone Giants are striding through the Black Hills, knocking trees down in their wake. Their footprints in the soft soil are as large as some of the Hills’ scattered small and sacred lakes. Occasionally one or more of the giants will stop, bend, and rip the top of a mountain off, throwing thousands of tons of dirt to one side or the other.

Paha Sapa has the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to giggle, to laugh, perhaps to weep. Are these
Wasichu
Stone Giants then mere
pispía
—giant prairie dogs?

Then he continues to watch and has no more urge to giggle.

The four
Wasichu
Stone Giants are plucking animals out of the forests and meadows of the Paha Sapa: deer from the high grasses, beaver
from their headwater ponds, elk from the hillsides, bighorn sheep from the boulders, porcupines from the trees, bears from their dens, coyotes and foxes and their cubs and kits from
their
dens, squirrels from branches, eagles and hawks from the very air….

And everything the four
Wasichu
Stone Giants pluck from the forest and fields, they devour. The huge gray stone teeth chew and chew and chew. The gray stone faces on the gray stone heads show no emotion, but the boy can feel their unsatiated hunger as they bend and pluck and lift and pop living things with their own souls into their gray mouths and chew and chew and chew.

Paha Sapa’s whisper is real, audible, formed by his
nagi
lungs and throat and mouth and forced out through his spirit-teeth, but it is also ragged.

—
Grandfathers, can you
stop
this?

Instead of answering, the thunder-rumble, wind-in-the-needles whisper comes back with another question.

—“Wasichu”
does not mean “White Person,” Black Hills. It means and has always meant “Fat Taker.” Do you see now why we gave your ancestors this word for the
Wasicun?

—
Yes, Grandfathers.

Paha Sapa did not know and never would have guessed that his spirit-body could feel sick to its stomach, but it does. He leans over the curling fingers of his protective Grandfather’s hand and watches.

The four
Wasichu
Stone Giants are striding out of the Black Hills now, each moving in one of the four primary compass directions as if guided by Paha Sapa’s poor little direction posts at his Vision Pit site. At first the boy cannot believe what he is seeing, but he uses his new eagle-vision to look carefully and his eyes are not deceiving him.

The
Wasichu
Stone Giants are killing buffalo and other plains animals now, using their giant stone heels on their
wasichu
stone shoes to squash the bison or antelope or elk before lifting the mangled carcass to their stone mouths three hundred feet above the green-and-brown-grass prairie. Somehow time has accelerated and the sun sets, the stars whirl above the Six Grandfathers and the crouching Paha Sapa, the sun rises again—a thousand times, tens of thousands of times—but the four
Wasichu
Stone Giants, roaming the plains to the horizon and
beyond but always returning, continue to smash with their heels, to pluck and to lift, and to chew. And chew. And chew.

Then Paha Sapa sees something that makes him scream into the high, thin, cold air of the sky where he and the Six Grandfathers float as insubstantially and as impotently as clouds.

Even before they kill the last of the millions of buffalo, the four
Wasichu
Stone Giants are chasing the people on the Plains and in the Black Hills and even those living far to the east and farther to the west: chasing and catching Paha Sapa’s Natural Free Human Beings and the Crow and the Cheyenne and the Blackfoot and the Shoshoni and the Ute and the Arapaho and the Pawnee and the Oto and Osage and Ojibwa, chasing the few pitiful remnants of the Mandan, sweeping up the Gros Ventre and Plains Cree and the Kutenai and the Hidatsa. All run. All are swept up. None escape.

Some of these little fleeing forms the four
Wasichu
Stone Giants tuck away in the stone pockets of their stone clothing, but others they throw far away, flinging the tiny, screaming, flapping human figures over the curve of the earth and out of sight forever. And some they eat. Chewing. Chewing.

—
Grandfathers! Stop this! Please stop this!

The voice Paha Sapa hears next is softer than the one or ones he’s heard before: low, musical, subdued, a combination of birdsong and water flowing around rocks in a stream.

—
Stop it? We cannot. You, our people, have failed to do so. Nor would it be proper to stop them. They are the Fat Takers. They have always been the Fat Takers. Do we stop the rattlesnake from striking its prey? Do we stop the scorpion from stinging the sleeping gopher? Do we stop the eagle from swooping down on the mouse? Do we stop the wolf or coyote from pouncing on the prairie dog?

The words rattle in Paha Sapa’s aching skull:
sinteĥaĥla, itignila, anúnkasan, hitunkala, šung’ manitu tanka, šung’ mahetu, pispía…

What do these mere
animals
have to do with the slaughter and extinction of the Natural Free Human Beings he is watching below? What does the nature of a scorpion or wolf or eagle or rattlesnake have to do with the murder and capture of men by men?