Paha Sapa would weep if he could. Limps-a-Lot was so proud when he introduced his first wife’s famous cousin to his adopted son just four nights earlier in Sitting Bull’s lodge, and now this absolute humiliation…

Still lying on his back, Paha Sapa spreads his arms and legs as wide as he is able. He’s lost his moccasins and now he curls his toes and fingers into the soil in the same way he’s done since he was a small boy when the first touch-the-earth-to-fly visions came. At once the old feelings flow in—that he is clinging to the outer surface of a swiftly spinning ball rather than lying on a flat world, that the sky hangs below him rather than above, that the hurtling sun is just another sky shape wheeling through the sky like the stars or the moon—and with that familiar illusion, Paha Sapa begins to breathe more deeply.

But so does the ghost. Paha Sapa can feel it inhaling and exhaling deep within him. And, he realizes with a shock that makes his spine go cold, the ghost is speaking to him. Or at least speaking to someone from inside him.

Paha Sapa would scream if he could, but still his straining lungs pull in only the thinnest trickle of air. But he can hear the ghost whispering slowly and steadily—the harsh-sounding and unintelligible wasichu words resonating against the inner walls of Paha Sapa’s skull and vibrating against his teeth and bones. Paha Sapa understands not one of the words. He clasps his hands over his ears, but the internal hissing and whispering and muttering continue.

There are other shapes moving among the dead around him now. Paha Sapa hears the trill of Lakota women and with incredible effort he rolls onto his belly and then struggles to his knees. He has disgraced himself and his uncle-father in front of Crazy Horse, but he cannot continue to lie like one of the dead with the women here.

As he struggles to his feet, Paha Sapa sees that he has startled the nearest woman—a Hunkpapa woman he knows named Eagle Robe, the same woman who earlier this day he saw shoot the black-Wasicun scout named Teat whom Sitting Bull called friend—and in her fright, Eagle Robe lifts up the same heavy wasichu cavalry pistol with which she killed the black scout, raises it in both hands, aims it at Paha Sapa’s chest from only ten feet away, and pulls the trigger.