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There we will confer with the others and decide what to do about your ghost.

4

Near Bear Butte

August 1865

    P AHA SAPA KNOWS THAT HE WAS BORN DURING THE MOON OF Ripening in the Year the Lightning Struck the Ponies.
    He knows that Lakota children are almost never named after places—his name, Paha Sapa, Black Hills, is very unusual and it made the other boys snicker—but he also knows that on the night that he was born near Bear Butte at the end of that hot, strange summer when the lightning struck the pony herd three times, the three most important men in the village—their war chief, Angry Badger; their old, tired
wičasa wakan
, Loud Voice Hawk; and their best and real
wičasa wakan
, Limps-a-Lot—all dreamed of the Black Hills.
    In his dream, Angry Badger saw a white wolf running out of the dark hills surrounded and backlit by lightning and the wolf spoke with thunder and on the wolf’s back was a crying and naked baby boy.
    Loud Voice Hawk dreamed that he was young again and able to ride his favorite horse,
Píšco
—Nighthawk—who had been dead more than thirty years, and Nighthawk galloped so fast that he carried Loud Voice Hawk into the night air, into the lightning itself, and when the Black Hills were below him, a huge white
cetán
—a hawk like the one he had been named after seventy-four summers before—rose up out of those hills and the hawk was carrying a naked baby boy child in its talons.
    Limps-a-Lot had not dreamed so much as had a vision. The thunder and lightning had wakened him and he had left his two wives andgone out into the hot, wild night—a night made wilder by the screams of Stands in Water dying as she worked to birth her child—and in the lightning to the north, beyond the hulking shape of
Matho Paha
, Bear Butte, Limps-a-Lot saw a baby boy’s face drawn by lightning in the clouds above the Black Hills.
    The morning after that fatherless boy was born and after the mother had bled to death and been prepared for burial by the women, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and Limps-a-Lot met in a closed lodge for six hours, smoking the pipe and discussing their dreams and visions. They decided that—as odd as it would sound to all Natural Free Human Beings—the orphan baby, if he lived, should be named Paha Sapa, for the infant had come from the Black Hills in each of their dreams.
    Paha Sapa has learned more about the details of his birth and about his dead parents than one might expect for a child who never knew his parents. He knows, for instance, exactly why his mother, Stands in Water, with only sixteen summers, died giving birth to him, and that her death was related to the fact that his equally young father, Short Elk, had been killed by Pawnee three months before Paha Sapa’s birth.
    He knew that Short Elk, who had not yet fully seen seventeen summers, had won Stands in Water in a raid on a Crow village where Short Elk had shown either much bravery or incredible stupidity. The Lakota raiding party had hit the Crow village, scattered their horses, and carried away several women—including Stands in Water, a Lakota who had been captive of the Crow for four years—and when the Crow warriors finally found horses, the twelve Lakota warriors had fled. But Short Elk had turned back, shouted
Hokahey!
, lifted his arms as if flying, and ridden through the Crow lines as they all fired and shot arrows at him. Nothing touched Short Elk. Then he rode
back
through the Crow skirmish lines, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, and his arms out to his sides. For his courage, Angry Badger and the other warriors had awarded him Stands in Water as his bride.
    But then, three months before Paha Sapa was born, Short Elk—quite full of himself now, with six beautiful ponies to his name—had joined five older warriors on a raid on a large Pawnee village far to the west of the Black Hills. This raid was for ponies only, and Wolf Turning, the older warrior leading the raid, told the others that when