Dan Simmons - Black Hills

— But still… my gosh, Father… just you riding all the way to Canada to find one man up there—and in the winter, I think you said. When you were fifteen years old. How’d you do it?

— I had a pistol.

Robert laughed so hard then that Paha Sapa actually worried the boy was going to fall off the cliff edge.

— That heavy Army Colt that you still own? I’ve seen that. What’d you kill for food with that monstrous thing? Buffalo? Antelope? Mountain lions?

— Rabbits, mostly.

— And you found Limps-a-Lot. After all that time?

— It wasn’t so long, Robert. Less than five years after Pehin Hanska Kasata— the summer we rubbed out Long Hair at the Greasy Grass…

Paha Sapa paused then and rubbed his temples as if he had a headache.

— You all right, Father?

— Fine. Anyway, it wasn’t so hard to find my tunkašila once I got up to Grandmother’s Country. The red-coated police told me where he was and said that I should leave and take him home with me.

— How had Limps-a-Lot survived the attack that killed his wives and almost everyone else in your village?

— He stepped outside his tipi when the detachment of Cook’s cavalry swept in at dawn and a bullet grazed him right here….

Paha Sapa touched his forehead and felt his own scar there, the one imparted by the stock of the old Crow scout Curly’s rifle. He paused a second, his finger remaining on the raised white welt that had been with him for thirty-six years. It was the first time he’d ever considered the fact that he and Limps-a-Lot had carried almost identical scars.

— Anyway, Limps-a-Lot was unconscious in the confusion, lying under the charging horses’ hooves, but two young nephews carried him from the battlefield, hid him in the willows, carried him out when the smoke from the burning tipis and bodies concealed their retreat. When my tunkašila awoke two days later, his old life and friends and wives and home—Angry Badger’s tiyospaye— were all gone forever, and he was on a travois and heading north to join Sitting Bull’s band in Grandmother’s Country.

— But Sitting Bull came back from Canada before he did.

— Yes. Limps-a-Lot had been ill with pneumonia when Sitting Bull took almost the last two hundred or so of his followers south—the rest had abandoned him, one family at a time, until his tiyospaye was a shadow of its former strength of eight hundred lodges—so I found Limps-a-Lot still ill up there in a village with only eight or ten dilapidated lodges and no food, my tunkašila living with only a couple of dozen old men and women too frightened to come back and too lazy or indifferent to take care of him in his illness.

— That was… what? Eighteen eighty-two?

— Eighteen eighty-one.

— So you brought him back, but not straight to the Standing Rock Agency.

— No, he went there later to be with Sitting Bull. First he rested and tried to recover while living with me near the Pine Ridge Agency. But he never fully recovered. And the pneumonia was not, I think, pneumonia—it never left him. I’m almost certain it was tuberculosis.

When Paha Sapa had started this story about his beloved grandfather, he’d slipped into full Lakota. Somehow, the discussion of Limps-a-Lot’s final days required this, he thought, but he also knew it would be difficult for Robert to follow fully. As good at languages as his son was, Paha Sapa knew that Robert’s only chance to practice Lakota was during his few summer weeks with his father and whenever they visited one of the reservations. This was a language, so beautiful and natural to Paha Sapa, in which a simple “thank you”— pilamayaye —translated literally to something like “feel good-me-you-made,” and a request for directions to a specific house would receive a reply such as Chanku kin le ogna waziyatakiya ni na chanku okiz’u icininpa kin hetan wiyoĥpeyatakiya ni, nahan tipi tokaheya kin hel ti. Nayašna oyakihi šni —which Robert would have to work out as “Road this along northward you-go and cross-road second from-that westward you-go and house first there he-lives. You-miss you-can not.” Statements involving technology became even more difficult for a nonnative Lakota speaker, so that merely asking the time became Mazaškanškan tonakca hwo? or “Metal-goes-goes what?” Most of all, it was a language in which everything had a spirit and volition, so that instead of saying, “It is going to storm”—a passive form that did not exist in Lakota at any rate—one said—“The Thunder Beings soon arriving-will-be.” In their wonderful four years of marriage, Rain—who was sublimely intelligent and had the advantage of being with many native speakers of Lakota—never really mastered the language and often had to ask Paha Sapa what someone from the reservation had said after a rapid-fire exchange of pleasantries.

But Limps-a-Lot’s spirit deserved having his final story told in Lakota, so Paha Sapa spoke slowly and in short sentences, pausing from time to time to make sure his son was following along.

— Limps-a-Lot did not like the Standing Rock Agency, but he liked living near his good friend Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull was killed just before the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns began—that is on December 17, and Sitting Bull died on December 15, 1890 , wasichu time, my son—I believe it was only the widespread belief in the Paiute Prophet Wovoka’s Ghost Dance that kept the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock from slaughtering all the wasichu and the tribal police as well.

Robert was frowning to concentrate as he held up his hand almost shyly to signify a request for interruption. Paha Sapa paused.

—Atewaye ki, émičiktunža yo— My father, excuse me, but is this because the Paiute Prophet Wovoka taught no-violence like the true-Christians?

— Partially, my son, because Wovoka’s message, sacred to the Ghost Dancers, was “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.” But mostly it was because the majority of the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock—especially the Hunkpapas, who had been listening to the Ghost Dancers the longest—believed in the Ghost Dancer’s prophecy that come that spring of 1891 and the greening of the grass, all the wasichus were going to disappear and the tall grass and the buffalos and their dead relatives would return. Most of the Hunkpapas had done their Ghost Dancing faithfully and well, dancing and chanting until they fainted. Many had their magical shirts to protect them from bullets. They believed in the prophecy. Can you understand me at this speed?

— Yes, my father. I will not interrupt again unless I do not understand. Please continue.

— After Sitting Bull was killed, the Hunkpapas had no leader. Most of them fled Standing Rock Agency. Some left for one of the Ghost Dance hiding places. Many went to be with the last of their great chiefs, Red Cloud, at Pine Ridge, where I lived at the time. I was going back to Pine Ridge, but Limps-a-Lot did not go with me. He and Sitting Bull had become good friends with the old leader of Minneconjous, Big Foot. This leader was also suffering from pneumonia that winter—or perhaps it was tuberculosis, the same as Limps-a-Lot had, since they were both coughing blood by then—and Big Foot was sure that the Wasicun generals were planning to arrest him, just as they had Sitting Bull. Big Foot was correct. The order for his arrest had been sent out already. Can you still understand me, my son?