Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa sees that Crazy Horse’s left arm is rigidly extended above the elaborately carved mane of the stallion and that the war leader is pointing with one finger.

The whole sculpture is 641 feet wide and 563 feet tall.

As the raven circles on the powerful thermals rising from the sun-heated stone—the air on this future fifth day of September is even hotter than in the previous vision-future—Paha Sapa can see that the carving of Crazy Horse’s face bears almost no resemblance to what the man looked like in life. That can be forgiven, he thinks, since Crazy Horse never allowed a photograph of himself to be taken or a portrait to be painted.

What is less forgivable, to Paha Sapa’s large-sculpture-trained eye, is that the quality of the carving and sculpture here is far inferior to Gutzon Borglum’s work. The entire pose is strained and awkward and clichéd and Paha Sapa can see almost none of the nuance that Borglum and his son worked so hard to achieve in their brute-force, pneumatic-drill efforts to evoke even the slightest shadings and tiniest minor hints of the dead presidents’ facial muscles and furrowed brows and most subtle expressions.

This huge, blocky, gesturing hero-Indian and his strangely European-feeling stone doodle of a prancing horse look to Paha Sapa—in comparison to Borglum’s work—as if they have been carved out of a bar of Ivory soap by a bored schoolboy with a dull knife.

Without asking the voices within him, he knows that the Sioux and Cheyenne and other nearby tribes hate this thing. He doesn’t know all their reasons for hating it and does not want to know. In a real sense, he does not need to ask; he already knows within himself. He only wishes he had another chance at this new target with his twenty-one crates of dynamite.

If he had a voice now, Paha Sapa would scream— You brought me forward in time again to see this? Will this punishment never end?

But he has no voice.

Still, the raven leaves the giant cartoon of Crazy Horse behind and turns north and gains altitude again, flapping and coasting its way out of the Black Hills and past Bear Butte again, onto the Great Plains.

THE CHANGES HERE are obvious and immediately visible.

The endless curving ring of autobahn is still there, but it looks aged and gray and there is little traffic on it. The cities and towns are much smaller. Rapid City looks to be a third the size it was in Paha Sapa’s day, much less in the mindless sprawl he just saw in his second vision. Spearfish is all but gone. Deadwood and Keystone and Casper and Lead, he realizes, are gone—there are no wasichu towns at all in the Black Hills when the raven flies north.

He has no idea what kind of catastrophe has caused this disappearance of so much and so many but his spirit-skin goes cold considering the possibilities.

The real shocks are still ahead.

Just north of the strangely empty autobahn , all former signs of habitation and what the wasichus invariably called civilization simply cease.

As the raven loses altitude, Paha Sapa can see that the state and county highways are… gone: blown up, broken up, plowed under, or simply overgrown. Only the vaguest traceries of straight lines, overgrown with healthy plants, give a hint of where all those dividing lines were.

He realizes that all the ranches are also missing. No single war or natural catastrophe could cause that, could it? Removing buildings and leaving not even the foundations, while the autobahn and smaller versions of Rapid City and other towns remain to the south and east? No, not war or plague or some natural catastrophe could account for that. This emptying-out of an entire region has to be the result of a purposeful, planned migration and of a careful deconstructing and removal of the works of man built here over a century and more… but to what purpose?

Why would the wasichus concievably unbuild and remove the ranches, barns, roads, power lines, sewer lines, stock tanks, fences, vehicles, cities, small towns, dogs, pigs, chickens, cattle, and other imported species—including themselves—that they had taken almost two centuries to seed the earth here with?

Paha Sapa realizes as the raven continues to descend that a tall fence runs parallel to the autobahn for as far as the raven’s eye can see in both directions. The raven takes care to land not on that fence, but on a nearby old wooden fence post with no wire attached.

That is something else that is missing beyond this point, Paha Sapa realizes—fences. Barbed wire. All the fences that sliced the prairie through all of the 20th Century and then resliced and resliced it again into ever smaller shapes are… gone.

There is a sign on the fence and while Paha Sapa has no idea if the raven with its small but wily brain can read it, Paha Sapa can.

danger—high voltage

Twenty yards to their left is an elaborate double gate with a cattle guard of round bars as the flooring. Paha Sapa guesses that the gate is automated. (This is the future, after all.)

The sign on the gate makes much less sense to him than did the high-voltage warning.

P.M.R.P. Tracts 237H—305J Access with Permits Only Warning: No Food, Shelter, or Services for the Next 183 Miles Warning: Dangerous Animals Warning: Human Contact May Be Hostile Permit Holders Proceed at Your Own Risk U.S. Dept of the Interior and Sec. of U.S.P.M.R.P.

The raven hops off the fence post and soars over the fence as if it does not exist. Bear Butte is within this wild area. Paha Sapa can see where there has been a winding road in to the rising butte, perhaps a parking lot and visitors area, maybe even a visitors’ center with restrooms or some sort of small museum.

They are all gone now, their former presence indicated only by a preponderance of weeds where the concrete and asphalt and foundations have been broken up.

The plant life is rich and varied both on and around Bear Butte. In Paha Sapa’s day there were mostly ponderosa pines on the hill itself, as well as some scrubby junipers. Now there is a profusion of pine and fir on the butte itself. The prairie at the base of the butte was mostly yucca and low, sparse grasses in Paha Sapa’s time: now it is rich with diverse plants, many of them unidentifiable to Paha Sapa’s eye.

He sees faded ribbons—prayer flags—and patches of once-colored cloth filled with tobacco hanging from the branches of the scrub oak and other deciduous trees that grow along the creek at the base of the butte. This doesn’t make much sense. The offerings are Sioux or Cheyenne… but don’t the electrified fence and gate sign five or six miles back suggest that all this is off-limits to most people?

The raven takes wing again, flying north along its now-familiar route to the river where Paha Sapa lost his band’s sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa sixty years ago and where most of that band and Paha Sapa’s extended family were wiped out by elements of Crook’s cavalry.

The day is even hotter down here than it was in the Black Hills but the land beneath the raven’s wings is not desert. Far from it.

The grasses are even richer and taller here than near Bear Butte. Paha Sapa saw only tiny patches of true tallgrass prairie as a child; now it extends east and west and north for as far as the raven’s eye can see from five thousand feet. Its bending in the wind that has come up is slower and more sinuous even than the Hand of God stroking of the world’s fur he remembered from the shorter grass prairie beyond his village.

He has no idea how the ancient tallgrass prairie could have returned.