On the eve of the Battle of Little Bighorn, June 24, 1876, during the Black Hills War between the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians and the U.S. Army, extraterrestrials arrive on Earth and make contact with Bison assis, the Sioux chief who is about to confront Colonel Custer's Seventh Cavalry Regiment. The extraterrestrials offer to exfiltrate his people to another planet, so that they can escape the fate that awaits them (extermination, confinement in reserves where the Indians will be fed games and brandy). Bison Assis, attached to the land of his gods and ancestors and seeing in the planet he is being made to live on another form of reserve, refuses. But one of the Sioux, Renard Borgne, who attended the interview, approaches the aliens and asks them to help him and his family escape, so that the Sioux people can live on a peaceful, gentle planet. The aliens arrange to meet him at dawn the next day and take him aboard their ship. But Bisson, who has heard everything, puts mescaline in Renard Borgne's soup. Renard Borgne and his family, hallucinating after ingesting the beverage, believe they see the spaceship appear and climb inside to tear through space. In reality, they're just wandering through the forest, hallucinated. When the real aliens show up, One-eyed Fox and his family are not there. The aliens leave, leaving the Sioux to their fate.