The windswept landscape carpeted with dull yellow prairie grass seemed to undulate with the rise and fall of gently rolling hills. Hazy, late September sunshine lay across the broad expanse of fields and meadows, spritzing wildflowers, wheat and thistles with luminescent light. In this place known as the South Dakota Badlands, rock formations stood like tiered layers of rainbow-colored slices of cake that connected Earth to sky. The constant hum of flying insects, grasshoppers and crickets, and the birdsong of tern, finch and meadowlark, was a chorale of winged creatures, large and small. John True Eagle, called Johnny T by his high school classmates, raised his head above the swaying sunburned grass, scanned the bare dirt atop the nearest hillock giving it the look of a balding scalp, and using his teeth, pulled the imaginary grenade pin from an old tennis ball and lobbed it high into the air across…
