Black Hills Read Online Free PDF

they gotthe ponies, they would ride hard and not stop to fight. But again Short Elk showed himself a hero. Disobeying Wolf Turning during the wild ride back across the plains, Short Elk had slid off his horse, driven a stake into the prairie, attached a ten-foot thong to the stake, and then wrapped the other end of the thong around his waist. The idea was that he would not move from that place. Short Elk cried to the other five Lakota—
    —
They cannot harm me! I see the future. The Six Grandfathers watch over me! Join me, my friends!
    The five older men pulled up their ponies but did not go back. They watched from a grassy hilltop two hundred broad paces away while fifty howling Pawnee rode Short Elk down and—in their anger at losing the ponies—leaped from their horses and cut the young, screaming warrior to pieces, gouging out his eyes while he lived and hacking off his arms, finally cutting his still-beating heart out of his body and taking turns biting into it. The five Lakota watching from the hilltop immediately left the stolen Pawnee horses behind and fled in terror across the prairie to their village.
    Stands in Water had been in mourning—weeping, screaming, moaning, tearing at her hair, and slicing flesh from her forearms and thighs and upper arms and even from her breasts—for the full three months between Short Elk’s death and her baby’s birth.
    Paha Sapa knew these things even when he was very young, not just because he had begun asking questions of his elders as soon as he could talk, but because of what he thought of as his
small-vision-backward-touching
.
    Paha Sapa had used his
small-vision-backward-touching
since before he could speak or walk, and he was well into his running-around little-boy years before he realized that not everyone had the ability.
    It did not always work. It usually did
not
work. But sometimes—and he could never predict when—the young Paha Sapa could touch another person’s skin and receive a jumble of memories and voices and sounds and visual images that were not his own. It took him far longer to learn how to sort out these brief, powerful floods of
other-thoughts
so that he could make sense of them than it took him to learn to speak or walk or ride a pony or shoot a bow.
    He remembers that when he was about three summers old, he touched the bare arm of Raven’s Hair, Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife (and Paha Sapa’s wet nurse after his real mother died), and received a wave of confused memory-thoughts of Raven’s Hair’s own baby dying only weeks before Paha Sapa was born, of her anger at Limps-a-Lot for bringing this other infant into her lodge, of her strange anger at Stands in Water—Paha Sapa’s dead mother—for grieving so terribly after her stupid boy-husband’s death that she kept slashing her arms and thighs with her knife in mourning far beyond an appropriate amount of time for that sort of behavior, bleeding and weakening herself too much—especially if one is very small and with small hips and pregnant and not strong to begin with after a long captivity with the Crows, as Stands in Water had been.
    At the age of three summers, Paha Sapa had seen through his
small-vision-touching
that his mother had come close to killing herself through this knife-slash mourning before he was born. Most Lakota women prided themselves on their relative ease of bearing children, feeling that
Wakan Tanka
—the All—had chosen them to be excused from at least a little of the pain and danger that afflicted all women everywhere. But at the age of three summers, touching Raven’s Hair, Paha Sapa had
seen
his young mother, pale and weak and sweating, her legs apart and her
šan
—her woman’s
winyaˇn shan
—open and ragged and bleeding, as Raven’s Hair and Three Buffalo Woman and the other women used moss and warm clay and even strips of hide softened to the thinness of cloth to try to stem that terrible bleeding, even while other women held him, squealing his lungs