Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Despite the pain, Paha Sapa is beginning to focus on the situation when the bouncing, wet-wool-reeking wasichus reach Slim Buttes, his own destination, late that afternoon.

The Crow scouts are sent in ahead, and Curly gestures angrily for “Bilé” on his slow horse to keep up. Paha Sapa is eager to get there and he kicks the lazy nag as hard as he can with his bare heels.

The four Crows and one Lakota boy ride into the familiar valley beneath the low, wooded hills, and Paha Sapa sees at once that there has been a battle. No… not a battle… a massacre.

Most of the tipis have been burned, but the few still standing show long knife slits where women, old men, children, and even terrified warriors cut their way out of the backs of the lodges in their panic. The entire valley stinks of ashes and human and horse shit, but much worse than that smell is the overwhelming stink of death.

The four Crow ride on. Paha Sapa slides off his horse at the first sign of familiar tipis and faces.

The only thing that gives him hope is that the few intact tipis here—or shreds of tipis—sport designs that look more like old Iron Plume’s tiyospaye rather than Angry Badger’s village. Many of the bodies here are burnt—looking too small ever to have been human beings of any age or size—but some are mutilated but otherwise intact, bloated and blackened by at least three days of late-summer sunlight and heat. Insects cover them. Animals and dogs—perhaps the dogs of this very tiyospaye —have been busy at them.

But some are still identifiable.

Paha Sapa sees Angry Badger himself, the little fat warrior’s corpse bloated to three times its normal size, lying on his back near the stream. His arms are raised as if in preparation to box. Paha Sapa somehow knows the gesture is only from a tightening of the muscles and tendons so visible where the dogs and coyotes and buzzards have been feasting. The bones of both forearms gleam white in the rainy gloom.

Farther on, where Limps-a-Lot usually set his lodge, Paha Sapa finds the blackened and knife-carved corpse of Three Buffalo Woman. There is no doubt it is her, even though the wasichus cut off her large breasts. While most of her kind face is gone, he can still see the unhealed scars on her forearms and thighs where she cut strips of her own flesh to place in his wasmuha rattle for Paha Sapa’s hanblečeya only days ago.

Centuries ago.

Thirty feet away is another woman’s corpse with one leg and both arms missing, carried away, and the swollen, putrid face chewed off to the skull, eyes long taken, but her black hair, although pounded into the mud by the constant heavy rain, is still intact. It is Raven. Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife. Where Raven’s arms would have been is what is left of what was once an infant. Not hers, Paha Sapa knows. Possibly Loud Voice Hawk’s new baby by the selfish old wičasa wakan’s youngest wife, Still Sleeps. Paha Sapa can imagine Raven taking the child and attempting to save it, even during the madness of a full cavalry charge.

A few paces farther on, closer to the cottonwood trees, he finds an unburned corpse, facedown, face gone, whose bloated but somehow still-withered arms show the faded tattoos that Loud Voice Hawk was so proud of.

It looks as if everyone was killed here as Crook’s cavalry charged through, burning and shooting and chasing down warriors and women and children alike. The entire valley is churned up with the hoofprints of hundreds of cavalry horses and hundreds of ponies.

Beyond this point, all the tipis have been burned, all the bodies reduced to blackened bird bones and charred flake-flesh. One of them might be, must be, Limps-a-Lot. He would not flee and leave his wives behind. Or his friends.

The four Crow scouts come back as Paha Sapa is attempting to mount the hard-leather-saddled horse they gave him. Curly is holding a repeating rifle, stock against his thigh as he reins up. His pony is mud splattered from hoof to hindquarters. Even the oversized pony’s mane is matted and clotted with mud. Beyond him, the full detachment of cavalry has filled the valley and moved on along the ridge to the southeast.

— Thinking of running, Bilé?

Paha Sapa has not thought of running and now he wonders why. As if reading his aching mind, the old Crow laughs and says something in guttural Absaroke to the other three Crow scouts. They laugh. Curly spits and speaks again in his effeminate almost-Lakota.

— It looks like General Crook and about a hundred and fifty cavalry from their main attachment did all this and finished their business with this village just a little ways beyond—there are more Sioux women’s and children’s bodies in the ravine just over that rise—and then the whole Fifth Infantry column arrived and bivouacked on a rise about a mile from here… oh… I’d say about three days ago, based on the state of the shit. But then the tracks show that about five hundred warriors arrived in a hurry from the south, your Sioux and Cheyenne both, most likely, based on the few corpses we found—the whole bunch almost certainly led by that bastard Crazy Horse—and while Crook’s cavalry must have outnumbered the hostiles at least four to one, that crazy bastard Crazy Horse attacked… the signs are clear on that… and then fell back to repel Crook’s counterattack. It looks like the tracks of the running fight continue on down the ridge for a couple of miles. Captain Shit-for-Brains here is pressing on to close up with Crook’s main column, but we’re sure that Crazy Horse is still out there somewhere, ready to pounce. Here, you may need this, Bilé.

The old Crow tosses Paha Sapa a long-barreled Colt revolver. The thing is heavier than Paha Sapa could have imagined, and just catching it makes his head and arm throb worse and almost pulls him off the scabbed horse. He straightens.

Curly is saying—

— I don’t think Crook’s people have any supplies left and they didn’t have time to hunt before Crazy Horse’s bucks attacked, so even if we catch up to them they won’t have any food either and we… what the fuck are you doing, Bilé?

Paha Sapa is lifting the heavy revolver, holding it steady in both hands. He aims it at Curly’s fat, smug Crow face and pulls the heavy trigger three times.

The gun does not fire.

All four of the Crow scouts laugh until they’re ready to fall off their muddy ponies.

Curly digs in his vest and brings out his fist, opens it. Half a dozen cartridges gleam ever so slightly in the dying gray light. Rain beads on brass.

— When you prove yourself, Bilé—or when Crazy Horse has us surrounded and we decide to shoot ourselves rather than become his captives—then you can have these.

The four Crows surround him, their Winchester rifles cocked on their hips or thighs, bandoliers across their scarred chests, pistols in their broad belts, and Paha Sapa’s slow horse labors and wheezes to keep up as they follow the main column southwest out of the valley and along the hoof-trampled ridge.

THEY MEET UP WITH GENERAL CROOK and many hundreds of other men (Curly tells Paha Sapa that there are two thousand men in the main body), and do what they call “bivouacking”—since the wasichus are afraid to set up a real camp because of the presence of Crazy Horse and his warriors—which means hunkering down in the pouring rain with nothing but mud underneath them and their ponchos or rain gear over their heads, eating what little hardtack they have left (Curly gives Paha Sapa two bites), and trying to sleep while every fourth man takes turns holding the horses.