Paha Sapa steps over a man whose scalped head has been smashed almost flat. Curds of gray have been spattered onto the tall grass that stirs in the evening breeze. Warriors or, more likely, women have cut out the man’s eyes and tongue and slit his throat. His lower belly has been hacked open, and entrails have been tugged out like a buffalo’s after a hunt—slick strands of gray gut wind and coil like glistening dead rattlesnakes in the bloody grass—and Paha Sapa notices that the women have also cut off the man’s ce and balls. Someone has shot arrows into this Wasicun’s opened body, and kidneys, lung, and liver have all been pierced multiple times. The dead man’s heart is missing.

Paha Sapa continues stumbling uphill. The white corpses are everywhere, all sprawled where they fell and many hacked into pieces, most mutilated and lying atop great splashes of blood or atop their own dead horses, but he cannot find the Wasicun whose ghost now breathes and whispers deep in his own guts. He realizes that since he has been only semiconscious at best, it’s possible that more time may have elapsed than he is aware of since he counted coup on the man. Someone, perhaps surviving wasichus, may have hauled the corpse from the battlefield—especially if the man was an officer—in which case Paha Sapa may never be able to get rid of this ghost.

Just when he is sure that the dead man is no longer lying among the scores of other corpses here on this bloody field, he sees the Wasicun’s tall, balding forehead protruding from a pile of white bodies. The stripped corpse is half-sitting against two other naked wasichus. Some woman or warrior has slashed his right thigh open in the customary mark against the Lakota’s dead enemies, but the man has not been scalped. Paha Sapa stares dumbly at the receding hairline and short-cropped light hair and realizes that the scalp was simply not worth the effort of the taking.