Dan Simmons - 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 the 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.

Paha Sapa returned to the Black Hills, but not to hunt or camp or worship. He came back to the stinking mining town of Deadwood to find work or to steal.

And there, already in jail after failing at his first attempt to steal and probably facing death by hanging, he met the holy men who dressed in black like ravens or crows with their white collars and who had their absurd tent school on the hill.

And if he had ever told that story to Rain or to Robert, he would have added that while the wasichus talked of the Starvation March and of the Battle for Slim Buttes, the Lakota forevermore referred to that battle—that battle where young Paha Sapa had led General Crook straight to Crazy Horse—as the Fight Where We Lost the Black Hills.

PAHA SAPA IS READING ABOUT ADOLF HITLER IN THE MORNING paper as he comes into the city by train.

In Washington, FDR has been president for less than a month (and according to the majority of South Dakota voters, overwhelmingly Republican, already the outlines of that man in the White House’s socialist agenda are becoming clear), and in Germany, Hitler has been Chancellor since January. The problem there, so it appears in this and other recent newspaper articles, is not socialism but the new chancellor’s and his party’s anti-Semitism. Jews there are protesting, says the New York Times , but the Nazis just voted into full power are responding to these protests by having their goons picket at Jewish stores and rough up shoppers who patronize Jewish-owned businesses.

Here in the city Paha Sapa is entering, a series of protest rallies on March 27—just five days earlier—saw an overflow crowd of 55,000 at Madison Square Garden, where AFL president William Green, US senator Robert F. Wagner, and the popular former New York governor Al Smith all called for an end to the brutal treatment of German Jews. Parallel protest events were held in Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and more than a score of other cities.

In response to the weak protests of the German Jews and the loud protests in America, the Nazi propaganda minister—Goebbels—just announced a nationwide one-day boycott by “Aryan Germans” against Jews in Germany. The Times has photographs of SA storm troopers with their signs preparing to block entrance to Jewish-owned businesses in Berlin. Paha Sapa has learned just enough German from the German miners and workers in the Black Hills to read the Fraktur script—“ Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from the Jews!”

Goebbels is quoted in the article as warning the Americans and others that if the protests against the Nazi behavior do not cease immediately, “the boycott will be resumed… until German Jewry has been annihilated.”

Paha Sapa sighs and sets the paper on the empty seat next to him. The train is crossing a bridge to Manhattan and all the skyscrapers and other high buildings are painted in the rich, cold light of the April first sunrise. It’s technically spring but the air outside is still chilly at night and there is frost on the window.

Paha Sapa wonders if Hitler and these Nazis could be the wasichu version of young Crazy Horse and the other heyokas —sacred clowns, Dreamers of the Thunder, spirit-possessed servants of the Thunder Beings whose failure to perform their duty meant death by lightning blast. Hasn’t he read somewhere that the Nazi SS officers wear twin lightning slashes on their collars or insignia somewhere…? Yes, Lila Kaufmann at the bakery in Rapid City told him that when she was a secretary in the city government in Munich before she and her family fled the country, the typewriters there had a dedicated key showing the double-lightning symbol of the SS. (Paha Sapa has no idea what those letters stand for, but can imagine the art deco straight-lined double-lightning-bolt insignia. Crazy Horse and his heyoka akicita “peacekeeper” tribal police pals would have loved wearing such an emblem.)

If Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of these unfunny clowns really are wasichu Thunder Dreamers, that would explain a lot, thinks Paha Sapa, including their obsession with rubbing out all of their real and perceived enemies. The Thunder Beings are sources of great power and staggering amounts of motivating energy for individuals and their tribes, but they are treacherous spirits, dangerous to everyone, even to their chosen Dreamers. The heyoka clown-warrior servants of the Thunder Beings are living lightning conductors and can strike their friends as well as enemies and themselves at any second with that terrible random ferocity of lightning.

Paha Sapa knows for a fact, after fifty-seven years of living with Crazy Horse’s memories, that T’ašunka Witko’s melancholy, sense of isolation, and frequent savagery were all manifestations of the Thunder Dreamers’ tribal license to terrible excess. The Natural Free Human Beings even have a word— Kicamnayan —for that sort of sudden, unpredictable flash of lightning, the frenzied swoop of swallows ahead of a thunderstorm, an otherwise placid horse’s sudden, senseless break into a panicked gallop, or the pitiless swoop and drop of the red-tailed hawk on its prey. Kicamnayan brought on by the surge of the Wakinyans’ primal, unquenchable, and frequently violent spirit energies manifested in the frailer forms of mere living instruments as mere shadow of their cosmic rage.