Black Hills by Dan Simmons Page A

believe I can feel the tips of my ears or nose!
    Back in the Nash, Paha Sapa tries to turn up the car’s primitive heater, but it’s already putting out what little heat from the engine it deigns to share. He unfurls the now-crumpled letter over the top of the broad steering wheel and reads:
    December 28, 1923
    Mr. Lorado Taft
6016 Ellis Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
    My Dear Mr. Taft:
    South Dakota has developed a wonderful state park in the Black Hills. I enclose a brochure illustrating some features of it. On the front cover you will observe some pinnacles—we call them needles—situated high upon the flank of Harney Peak. The tops of those shown are more than 6300 feet above sea level. These needles are of granite.
    Having in mind your “Big Injun,” it has occurred to me that some of these pinnacles would lend themselves to massive sculpture, and I write to ask if in your judgment human figures might be carved from some of them as they stand. I am thinking of some notable Sioux such as Red Cloud, who lived and died in the shadow of those peaks. If one was found practicable, perhaps others would ultimately follow.
    Pinnacles could be found immediately above the highway shown, that stand fully one hundred feet in the clear, above pedestals hundreds of feet in height, as seen from the other points of vantage.
    This granite is of rather coarse texture, but it is durable. There are also in the vicinitygreat blank walls upon which groups in relief could be executed advantageously.
    The needles shown are only suggestive of the field, many others are trimmer—only a few feet in diameter—and exceedingly showy.
    I shall be pleased to hear from you, and if it appears practicable we can, perhaps, induce you to come and look us over.
       Faithfully,
     
Doane Robinson

    P AHA S APA DRIVES THEM BACK toward Rapid City as fast as the Nash’s skinny tires will carry them on the frozen roads. He doesn’t ask Mr. Robinson if Lorado Taft, the sculptor, has responded to the letter yet, since there has hardly been time for that. He drives in silence except for the banging four-cylinder engine and the loud but heatless burr of the heater fan.
    —
What do you think, Billy?
    Paha Sapa likes Doane Robinson; he likes the man’s gentleness and learning and sincere interest, however poorly focused, in the history of Paha Sapa’s people. And he loves Doane Robinson’s library and the new look at the universe it has given him. But at that moment, he also thinks that if Robinson had shown him the letter to the sculptor before he mailed it, Paha Sapa would have used the simple bone-handled jackknife with the five-inch blade now in his pocket to cut the writer-historian’s throat, leaving his body in the woods along the Needles Highway and his Nash in a ravine somewhere many miles away in the Black Hills.
    —
Billy? What do you think of the idea? Do you think Red Cloud would be the choice for the first Sioux leader to be carved into one of the pinnacles? Did you know Red Cloud?
    Makhpiya Luta
, Red Cloud, was famous for his victory in the Battle of the Hundred Slain, but all that fighting had ended by the time Paha Sapa was two summers old. Paha Sapa knew old Red Cloud primarily as an agency Indian, someone who had surrendered the plains and lands of the last Natural Free Human Beings, and Paha Sapa was near the RedCloud Agency at Camp Robinson in 1877 when a jealous nephew of Red Cloud’s betrayed Crazy Horse, bringing him back to the fort to be murdered. Red Cloud outlived all the real warrior chiefs—Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse—dying as an old, old man only fourteen years earlier in 1909.
    —
I didn’t really know Red Cloud.
    —
What about Crazy Horse, then, Billy? Do you think it would be appropriate if Mr. Taft sculpted a huge statue of
T’ašunka Witko
here in the Hills?
    Paha Sapa grunts. Here on the east side of the ridgelines, the evening shadows are growing quickly and he has to drive extra carefully to keep the Nash