Panther in the Sky (18 page)

“Brother?”

“Yes?”

“At this time I think of the prayer words.
Neweh-canateh-pah Weshemoneto.”

“The Great Good Spirit favors our People. Yes. It is good to be who we are. The blessed People.”

“And how good it is that you are my brother.”

“It is good for me, too, Tecumseh. I am proud.”

“Chiksika!
Tap-a-lot,
my brother,” Tecumseh blurted. He knew a man was not supposed to show how he felt, but he had to blink because of the stinging tears on his eyelids. Chiksika nodded, compressing his lips and crumpling his chin, and reached over and pulled Tecumseh’s earlobe gently.

“I love you as well. Every day our family grows more and more proud of our Tecumseh. Our father would be very pleased. Now, come. They will be even more proud when they see what you have done today.”

S
TAR
W
ATCHER PUT THE DEER’S BRAIN IN A WOODEN BOWL
and mashed it with a pestle until it was smooth, while her mother stretched the hide between two posts and then worked slowly over the inside of the skin with a scraper made from a shoulder blade, removing all the flesh and fat. “Such a big buck,” Turtle Mother said with a sigh. She was not complaining of how big a hide it was to flense. She was very proud of her boy and of how he had killed the buck so expertly that it had not died in pain and terror.

Turtle Mother had a heavy heart on this day. This was the Hunter’s Moon, and it had been in the Hunter’s Moon three years ago that her husband, Hard Striker, had gone away to be killed because she had yielded to him and not spoken against war in council. Whenever the leaves turned red and yellow she would sigh and feel the loss of him so deeply that she could hardly speak. Her mourning time had ended two years ago, but she had never stopped mourning. And every time she heard of another Shawnee hunter being found dead somewhere in the hunting grounds down near the Beautiful River with white men’s footprints around, she would grow more bitter. Her husband’s life had been thrown away in a useless battle, and still the white men came over the river, ignoring even their own treaties. Now Turtle Mother did
not like even the British, who brought new knives and blankets and kettles for the people and fixed broken guns for the warriors. They were still white men, and it was their conflict with the Long Knives that kept the country full of blood and revenge and cost the lives of warriors every year. Always she expected that Chiksika would go away and not come back. He was like a mad animal against the Long Knives, and from the tales the other warriors told, he was too bold. How often Turtle Mother would remember that autumn three years ago and think: We should have paid heed to Cornstalk. Cornstalk signed a peace with the white chief, and now he does not have to feel his heart eaten by revenge.

Sometimes Turtle Mother thought the best thing would be to leave the valley of the Beautiful River and go where there were no white men.

She scraped the last pink shred of flesh she could find and called to her daughter, “I am ready for that.”

Inside the
wigewa
Star Watcher pulled her skirt up to her waist and squatted over the bowl and urinated into the mashed deer brain. Then she stirred it all into a pasty fluid and carried the bowl to her mother. Star Watcher was not unhappy, as her mother was. She was delighted with many things. This excellent kill by her little brother, for one. And there glowed in her a great warmth for Stands Firm, who had come to live in Chillicothe because, she believed, of his love for her. And then, too, this was the harvest and hunt season, and she was aware of the great caches of grain and nuts stored up everywhere in the town and of the great quantities of game meats being dried and salted so aromatically everywhere, all this that would feed the People through the coming winter. The Great Good Spirit and Kokomthena did indeed favor the People, and Star Watcher was always grateful, especially in this bounteous season.

Side by side with her mother she worked; they smeared the acrid, yellow-gray mixture thickly over the cleaned side of the deerhide. Then they untied thongs and took the hide down from the posts and rolled it up with the skin side inward. The hide would be left alone for three days, and the fluid would start tanning the hide. After that it would have to be worked and rubbed and pulled to make it more pliable. A deer had just enough brain to tan his own hide; that was one of the ways Our Grandmother had measured everything out in the Creation.

And then, just as Turtle Mother and her daughter went to tend the fire over which strips of venison were drying, they heard the
first of the shouts and wails coming from the east side of the town. The voices were fierce and full of grief.

Even before they heard any words, they knew that something awful had happened. They crouched, Turtle Mother holding her daughter by the wrist, ready to go round up the triplets and flee if this was danger coming.

Within moments all of Chillicothe was in an uproar of yelling, wailing, and drums. The mighty voice of the town chief, Black Fish, was calling everyone to the council house. Suddenly Stands Firm rushed up through the smoke and stopped. Usually he would come to the house shyly, taking care not to look too hard at Star Watcher, and she would lower her eyes. But now he was shaking, and his teeth were bared in a sneer of hatred.

“The Long Knives murdered Cornstalk,” he snarled.

Turtle Mother groaned between clenched teeth. “Tell me!”

“That is all I know. The messenger is at the council house!
Pe-eh-wah,
come!”

Black Fish with raised arms quelled the drone of anguished voices in the council ground. He called upon Weshemoneto to give the People strength and courage to bear what was happening to the nation. Then he told them in a voice grim and harsh:

“What has happened in the new Long Knife fort at the mouth of the Kanawha-se-pe we know to be true because our white brother Girty learned of it and sent us the messenger. It is this:

“Hokoleskwah, our beloved principal chief Cornstalk, went in peace to that fort, which the Long Knives have built on the place where we fought our greatest battle three years ago. With him were his son, and his chieftain Red Hawk. Cornstalk went there only to remind the Long Knives of his treaty with them. He went to explain that the Shawnees who raid Kain-tuck-ee are not his treaty signers, and that they only do it to avenge murders the Long Knives have done. He went to protest and to remind them that he was at peace with them. The whiteface captain of the fort took their guns away and made them hostages, and put them in a room. And then many of the Long Knives there went into that room. Cornstalk and his son and Red Hawk saw what was going to happen. They stood beside each other and were praying when the soldiers shot them with many bullets!” Black Fish’s hard blade of a face was a grimace as he told this. His chin quivered when the pitiful moans of dismay and the wails of grief rose around him.

T
HEY TALKED LOW THAT NIGHT IN THE
WIGEWA
OF
T
URTLE
Mother and her children. Chiksika’s face had gone stony with hate. “The Long Knives are the spawn of the Great Serpent,” he muttered. “They crawled from the sea slime onto the shore of our land. They must be pushed back into that sea slime!”

Turtle Mother’s mouth was drawn down in bitterness. “We should not have fought them three years ago. This is more of their vengeance. Now it is too late to have peace ever again. It is time to give up this land and go where there are no white people. There we could live in peace, as in the good days before we ever angered them.”

Chiksika looked at his mother with astonishment. And then for the first time in his life he rebuked her. “I cannot believe what words you said! Do you think our father would be pleased to hear that? No! He believed that we must fight to keep them out of our country, as long as one of us draws breath! You know the promises he asked from me, and from Tecumseh. I will not hear those words you said! Our father told me women are strong, that they can bear anything! You talk like a weak woman!”

She took a sharp breath, her nostrils distended, eyes drilling her son’s face. Star Watcher pressed her palms over her ears to keep from hearing more, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Tecumseh ached to soothe his mother’s hurt, though he felt that if either she or Chiksika was right, it was Chiksika.

T
HERE WOULD BE MOURNING FOR
C
ORNSTALK THROUGHOUT
the Shawnee nation, and it would go on far beyond the customary mourning time, for Cornstalk had been the greatest Shawnee chief in the memory of anyone, even the most ancient. If he had refused to listen to the whitefaces’ lies about treaties and trust, they might have killed him in battle by now anyway, but they could not have murdered him helpless in a room.

“Now the whitefaces have done themselves great harm,” Chiksika told Tecumseh as they rode out to hunt more meat for the coming winter. “They murdered a chief who pledged peace with them. Our next chief is one who does not trust them and will never stop fighting them. Our father Black Fish!”

“Black Fish will be?”

“You will see, little brother. When all the voices are heard in the next council, Black Fish will be the one. Some of the gray-hairs who are too weary to fight anymore, they will want a peaceful chief. This is always so. We love and respect our old men, but because of the Long Knives this is a time for warriors to lead.
Listen. Some of the old ones say we should sit still and try to be friends with the white people, and share their riches. And some like our mother say we should flee to where there are no Long Knives. Beyond the Wabash-se-pe, toward even the Missi-se-pe.

“Those who wish to do those things can go, and no one will condemn them. But Black Fish says he has not finished what he began in the Hunger Moon. There are still Long Knives in Kain-tuck-ee. He desires to chase them back over the mountains, and the murder of our greatest chief only makes him stronger in his purpose. Listen, little brother. I tell you that Black Fish is great, too. He knows the British officers well. They have told him that they will pay our warriors for every Long Knife we take to them as a prisoner. The British governor-soldier Hamilton at Detroit has sent emissaries to all the tribes, saying that he will buy the scalps of the Americans, too, if they cannot be made prisoners. And greatest of all, the British will lend us some of their brave soldiers and officers to help us in Kain-tuck-ee. You have seen the great British soldiers, in their red clothing. They are said to be the bravest soldiers in the world!”

Tecumseh remembered that the first British Redcoats he had seen had been afraid, but he did not interrupt Chiksika to remind him of that. His brother went on:

“And they have cannons! The great rolling-guns that can knock down a Long Knife fort at once! They have promised Black Fish that they will pull their rolling-guns down to Kain-tuck-ee and shoot down the gates of those forts so we can rush in. Listen! If there had been British rolling-guns with us last spring to knock down Boone’s Fort and Harrod’s Fort, there would not be a white man still living in Kain-tuck-ee! Black Fish is ready to do this with the British. Black Fish says this is a time for the Shawnee to be brave, not timid. Listen. He will be the principal chief, and he will do things that will make his name as great as Cornstalk’s. I am proud that he has taken us as his sons. With Black Fish before us and his British allies beside us shooting the cannons at the forts, we can drive the Long Knives out, and have our land the way it was before!”

A
ND SO WHEN
B
LACK
F
ISH WAS ELECTED TO BE THE PRINCIPAL
chief, he was strong and eager for vengeance. He said he would not give the Long Knives a chance to rest even in the winter. He had eager young warriors and chieftains who would take raiding parties into Kain-tuck-ee to harass the Long Knife settlers, capture prisoners, kill cattle, attack supply boats, and obtain
horses. These raiders would be like wolves in the snow, and they would make life so hard for the Americans that they would flee back out of the country—if there were any left alive to flee.

Black Fish favored several young men as leaders for these raids. One was his foster son, Chiksika. Another was Stands Firm. Another was the hickory-tough warrior Blue Jacket, who was brave and resourceful, who could think as white men think and thus know what they might do. Blue Jacket’s hatred of the Long Knives was so strong that it was hard to remember that he had been born a white person. Whenever Tecumseh would look at that splendid warrior, he could scarcely believe that he as a child had whipped him in a blind fury in the gauntlet, only seven years ago.

S
NOW SNAKES WERE STREWN FAR OUT ACROSS THE WHITE
meadow.

Thick Water, the long-armed, sinewy Kispoko boy who had been such a great hoop roller years ago in Kispoko Town, was looking very smug at this moment, because he had just sent his snow snake hissing and slithering about a hundred paces across the snow, so far that surely even Tecumseh could not surpass his throw. Tecumseh was much younger than Thick Water but was nevertheless the best snow snake thrower known. But that had been before Thick Water had moved to Chillicothe with his family.