Panther in the Sky (16 page)

“For a long time I have had dreams about the ground trembling. Now since I have been with you I have had those dreams every night. I believe the dream has something to do with you.”

Those words made Tecumseh’s heart leap. He and Eagle Speaker were sitting close to the fire ring in Chiksika’s hut. Tecumseh was wrapped in a robe to get the chill out of his limbs. He said: “Sometimes I have felt the earth shudder under my feet when no one else did. Sometimes it has almost thrown me to the ground.”

Eagle Speaker sat very still for a long time, and something was passing in the air between them, something invisible, something like the hum of power Tecumseh had felt from the Chalagawtha medicine bundle. Finally Eagle Speaker asked, “Did you see anything when you felt this?”

“I saw water run backward, uphill. Nothing else.”

Eagle Speaker gasped. His eyes were shut. He said: “When I dream of the trembling ground, I see the water in a river stopping and swirling around and then going back where it came from, like the big waves that flow up on the sand at the edge of the big lakes with a roar and then run back. Have you seen this?”

“My brother says we will travel to Mis-e-ken someday to see the big lake. But I have not seen that yet.”

“There is something I do not know yet about this,” Eagle Speaker said. “It is the time when it will happen. It is not soon; maybe it is a lifetime away. It is to be in a year of deep troubles. The year will begin with a light in the sky. The animals will be upset. There will be war that year. I have seen a bundle of sticks tied together with thongs, then the thongs broken and the sticks scattered. These things I see in the dream. But then when all these things are bad, I see the earth shake and the water in the river go backward, and then the bundle of sticks is again tied together.
Perhaps these things that I have seen, you should keep them in your mind, too. Change-of-Feathers has told me you were born when the star shot over the sky. That was when I dreamed of these signs. And I can remember a few days later your family riding into Chillicothe, and the people saying there had been a birth in Hard Striker’s family while the green star was passing over.”

B
Y THE FOURTH COLD MOON,
T
ECUMSEH HAD BECOME VERY
much hardened. He had mastered his body enough to walk slowly down to the river even in snow. He could make the Sun flare inside him and keep himself from shaking, even on days when he had to pause at the river’s edge and throw big rocks to break the ice. Chiksika had gone out with several hunting parties during that time, sometimes coming home with much meat, sometimes with none. He had seen no whitefaces on this side of the Beautiful River, but on one hunt his party had found the frozen body of a Peckuwe man who had been shot several times through the body and his fingers and scalp removed, then left for the carrion eaters. Around him were the prints made by white men’s hard-heeled footwear. Every one of the victim’s belongings had been stripped off and taken away. Only a beaded pouch had been overlooked, and by the beadwork Chiksika had been able to identify the Peckuwe man. Chiksika had recounted this through clenched teeth and hardened lips. His hatred for the Long Knives was growing to be the most important thing in his soul. He said he could hardly wait for the winter to be over, so that he could join the soldiers of the English king and go down into Kain-tuck-ee and kill the Long Knives who were settling there. He said he wanted to bathe himself in their blood.

Tecumseh could hardly wait for the end of winter also, but it was because he wanted the ordeal of the cold river to be over. Like Chiksika, he was shocked and angry about the Long Knives, but the ordeal of the river was closer to him just now. It was his main preoccupation, and most other matters seemed far away.

Then came a morning early in the Hunger Moon when the sky had cleared after a week of snows, and it had suddenly become so cold that trees had cracked like gunshots in the night. When the sun came up that morning it shone through a glittering haze. The air itself was freezing. When his mother woke him up her breath was clouding even though she had already put wood on the fire. Only the center of the
wigewa,
a few feet right around
the fire itself, was even slightly warm. She looked worried and told Tecumseh:

“You will need to pray very hard this morning, because this is that kind of cold that makes fingers and toes come off. One’s heart must be of fire on such a day or it will become ice. Pray hard and be careful.” She did not say it, but she wished very fervently that he would not have to go into the river on a day like this. She was afraid.

“I have grown very strong,” he told her to keep her from worrying. But he was scared. It was on just such a day, which could be judged the coldest day of the winter, that Black Fish might declare that the time had come for him to do the four dives and find his
pa-waw-ka.

And it proved to be so. When he arrived at Chiksika’s lodge, his ears and nostrils stinging with cold, Black Fish himself was waiting for him in the hut with Chiksika. People in nearby
wigewas
were peeking out their doors. “Tecumseh, my son,” the chief said, “take off your clothes and we will go down to the river. This will be the final day. I will pray with you as you go into the river. All will be well. I have been told that you are a very strong boy.”

It was so cold that Black Fish instructed him to hold his hands over his genitals as they walked down. “So they won’t freeze off before you ever enjoy them,” he said.

The surface of the snow was frozen in a crust that broke with sharp edges as he walked, but his feet were so numb at once that he felt no pain in walking. Many people had come out to watch. They stood wrapped to their ears in blankets and robes, shifting from foot to foot, and the steam from their mouths froze into glittering clouds. Many of these were people who had taunted him in the beginning, but they were silent now, and he could see sympathy in their eyes. Chiksika had told him that although it was not common for boys to die or be seriously harmed by this, some did get frostbitten fingers or toes, and some became very sick. And of course in past years a few had died from the shock.

As they walked down now, their faces grave with prayer, Tecumseh could hear blows being struck and saw that some men were already breaking the ice for him with axes and heavy poles. He was thankful that he would not have to break the ice himself, for the ice looked thick and strong, and he imagined that he had just enough heat and strength in him for the four dives and no more.

He was using all the strength of his will to keep from shuddering
or groaning. His teeth were chattering, and the cold air was searing his nostrils as he breathed. He was praying with such concentration that behind his eyes he could see the flames of the inner fire being fanned by Weshemoneto’s breath.

Now they came to the river and walked out on the ice, to the edge of the hole the men had made. The water in the hole was full of crushed and broken ice, which moved and gnashed as the current flowed under.

“Three times you must go under the water, and three times you must climb out,” Black Fish said. “The fourth time you must go to the bottom and grasp whatever your hand finds, and bring it up. Waste no time now, my son. Go!”

Tecumseh gasped a deep breath and jumped feet first through the floating fragments of ice, which had already in the intense cold begun freezing together again. The shock was less than he had expected; the air had been so cold that even this icy water was a little less so. The fire burned in him, and so far he was all right.

Blowing and gasping, he surfaced and quickly scrambled out onto the ice. This was the worst shock of all. The cold air on his wet skin pierced him so deeply, he felt that the fire would go out entirely. He felt as if his whole body lay on the edge of a great knife. The people on the shore were praising and encouraging him, but their voices sounded as thin and piping as birdcalls through the ringing in his head. He heard Black Fish say, “Again!” He turned and plunged in again. Again he scrambled out. As he turned to plunge in the third time, he was aware of a strange rattling at his ears and realized that his wet hair had frozen. “Again,” said Black Fish’s voice, and he leaped once more.

Now as he tried to climb out, gasping desperately for breath, he knew that his body was growing weak and clumsy. His hands and feet, even his elbows and knees, could feel nothing, not even the hard ice. His heartbeat fluttered inside his heaving chest like the wings of a trapped bird. Chiksika’s face appeared above him, and it was tense and full of worry. Then Tecumseh was at last standing on the ice again, somehow standing up even though every part of him was quaking as if to shake him apart.

“Now,” Black Fish said. “Find your
pa-waw-ka.
” For a moment Tecumseh’s aching brain could not quite remember what this meant. Then he remembered what he had yet to do. Chiksika’s voice came into his head:

“Pray!”

Now Tecumseh prayed, not with words but with a desperate outreaching of his soul to Weshemoneto, and this time, crouching over, his body bending as stiffly as old wood, he held his breath and fell headfirst through the rattling blue-white ice and propelled himself toward the bed of the river, his hands outstretched before him. He was a small vessel of pain and exhaustion with a fire in its core.

Chiksika and Black Fish and the spectators stood looking anxiously at the hole in the ice. Moments passed. They watched and prayed for the boy down there now unseen under the ice. Chiksika was shifting his weight, thinking how much time was passing, getting ready to dive under the ice himself and get Tecumseh if the boy did not surface in the duration of three more breaths.

Two more …

One more …

And just as he crouched to leap in, his soul ringing with urgency, he saw something dark move in the greenish water under the broken ice. The dark shape became more distinct, then the ice rattled and a little fist came up, then the head of frozen black hair. Chiksika’s love leaped across the space to those wild eyes. He reached down and grasped one icy little wrist and Black Fish grabbed the other, and they pulled the slender brown body out of the hole. It was a moment before Tecumseh could stand. His bones ached into the marrow, and his feet were too numb to feel the firm ice under them. He was gasping desperately. But he was grinning; under the black icicles of his frozen hair, his chattering teeth shone through a triumphant smile. He had done it! His fists were full of debris from the riverbed, too numb to feel what they held. But he was sure he had his
pa-waw-ka:
something was burning through the numbness of his left palm.

I
T WAS HOURS BEFORE THE TERRIBLE ACHE WAS OUT OF HIS
bones. He sat wrapped in a buffalo robe by the fire in Chiksika’s hut. The news had gone through the village that Tecumseh, the war chief’s son born under the sign of the Panther in the Sky, had completed his ice ritual on the coldest morning most people could remember, and that he was fully well, not sick or even coughing, and that he had found a very good
pa-waw-ka.

Sometimes the boys would come up with only mud and dead leaves or rotted sticks and gray gravel, and they would have to carry these crumbs and bits in their medicine bags as their
pa-waw-kas.
Even such poor fragments would serve, of course, as means to bring warmth and strength. It was the earning of them
that made them powerful. But to find something durable and good to look at while groping blindly with numb fingers in the bottom of the river was a sign of special good fortune. His father’s had been a piece of a fox’s spine. And what Tecumseh had brought up was such a good thing, a beautiful thing.

He sat by Chiksika’s fire, drinking hot broth, very happy, the ordeal being over; he sat under his brother’s proud gaze, turning the object over and over in his tingling fingers, feeling the warmth, watching how the firelight limned its facets. It was a stone like a piece of ice. When it was turned to and fro in light, it shifted and rearranged the colors of a rainbow. Black Fish himself had exclaimed in wonderment at the sight of it. It had come a long way from somewhere in the countless years since the Beginning, becoming what it was as it came, and it had taken all of time to place itself there where Tecumseh’s numb hand would close over it. And now in his fingers it was full of tiny rainbows. It was an incomparable treasure that he would keep until he died.

It contained the fire that had kept him alive long enough to obtain it.

Star Watcher, her heart full of quiet joy and thanks, made a fine, soft little bag for him to carry it in and sewed tiny yellow-green beads on it in a design like a panther’s eye. Turtle Mother said to her, “I have never seen anyone make a design like that. Where did you find it?”

Star Watcher answered, “It was shown to me in my head, while I was praying for him not to die.”

“T
HE DEER ARE A PEOPLE, AS WE ARE
,” C
HIKSIKA SAID, JUST
above a whisper. “And so they do certain things at certain times, as we do. If you understand them, you will always be able to find them.”

Chiksika and Tecumseh were waiting in a dense, shadowy grapevine tangle that had strangled a sycamore tree on the bottomland of a creek. The grapevines made a good hunting blind, as the sycamore stood about twenty paces from a well-worn deer path that wound along the forested bluff and down to the creek’s pebbled beach. The brothers had their weapons ready. Chiksika’s rifle was loaded and primed. Tecumseh, who did not have a firearm yet, was ready with his new bow. This was no rabbit-hunting bow. It was a powerful, gracefully curved weapon made not from hickory but from the dark, heavy wood of osage, a treasured wood that one had to range far to find. It required strong arms and shoulders to draw it. It was a man’s weapon, a bow for killing big animals, and Tecumseh, not yet ten, was one of the few boys who could have used such a bow.