Panther in the Sky (23 page)

Tecumseh’s blow did not miss; it connected with But-lah’s right arm so smartly that the stick split and stung Tecumseh’s palm. And then the boy was standing there with his heart pounding, watching as the man sped on through the storm of whistling switches, his powerful buttocks and haunches pumping, crisscrossed with welts.

A few paces farther along the line something happened with such quick violence that Tecumseh could hardly perceive it. A zealous warrior had stepped out between the ranks with upraised club. He and the white man collided somehow. In the next instant the warrior’s senseless body thumped to the ground. A moment later But-lah himself was collapsing under a barrage of blows, and soon his blood-streaked whiteness was lost to sight under the swarm of people who were beating him. Tecumseh remembered the time when the young prisoner who was now Blue Jacket had collapsed and lain under such a punishment and Tecumseh himself had gone blank in the passion of whipping that white skin. The memory, which he had seldom thought of in the years since, troubled him, made him feel a little queasy.

And so when But-lah was brought staggering, bleeding, and gasping back up the line to start the gauntlet all over again, Tecumseh did not like the sight of the bloody white skin. And when the white man ran past a second time, still fast and powerful but less steady, Tecumseh swung halfheartedly at him and was not disappointed that he missed.

But-lah never made it to the council lodge. On this second run he whooped, veered, and crashed through one of the lines, bowling over a woman. But another woman turned and felled him outside the line with a hard blow of a hickory staff. And then the crowd converged on him again, and this time they beat him unconscious and kept beating on him for a long time afterward, as if afraid he might yet rise up.

The great white warrior and horse thief had finally been subdued, and Shawnee women had done it. It was a time for great merriment. But Tecumseh had drawn into himself, feeling a strange shame, an unworthiness. He wanted to be away from the people and stop hearing what they were saying. He wondered if there might be something wrong with him, that he did not rejoice in the enemy’s humiliation and pain. All his life his mother had talked to him about being kind and merciful to people.

But that, he had always understood, meant his own people. Surely not the enemy, an awful enemy like the Long Knives.

The battered prisoner was dragged unconscious to a lodge where, under guard, he would be doctored and fed and kept alive until Black Fish and the other chiefs came home and decided his fate.

W
HEN
B
LACK
F
ISH RODE INTO
C
HILLICOTHE UNDER A LEAD-
gray sky a few days later, it was not a triumphant return. His huge Shawnee force had failed again to capture Boone’s Fort, even with a two-week siege. Thirty-seven warriors had died by the marksmanship of Boone’s defenders; everyone in Chillicothe had at least one relative to mourn. Many came home wounded, including Chiksika. Black Fish had been blaming the British, who still had not brought cannons. The failure had been made worse by the word of Clark’s victories in the Missi-se-pe and Wabash-se-pe valleys. Black Fish was in a dark, tormented mood.

And so when he was told of the capture of the white giant But-lah, a vicious glitter appeared in his eyes, and it was evident that the lone white horse thief But-lah was not going to find a merciful heart in the head chief of the Shawnees. On the contrary, this prisoner seemed certain to become the outlet for all the pent-up fury and frustration that now boiled in Black Fish’s soul. Black Fish wasted no time. Since so many of the nation’s war chiefs and subchiefs were already present, he called for a council to settle But-lah’s fate. It would be held as soon as the great mourning for the thirty-seven warriors had been done.

When that day came, the huge council house was filled with chiefs and warriors, hundreds of them. But-lah, still naked, tied up, his body a mass of healing wounds, was led out of the lodge and toward the council house by a rope halter. People spat on him as he went. Almost every inch of his body was marked by welts and bruises, but he was still the strongest-looking man they had ever seen, and he still walked unbowed and looked unafraid as he went in. Tecumseh watched him with awe and hatred, then crowded into a place by the door to watch. He saw Chiksika sitting inside, a bloody bandage on the side of his neck.

The council opened. Several chiefs spoke at length, praising the trackers for catching But-lah and recommending that he be burned to death. Almost all agreed, and he was painted black, the symbol of death. Then Black Fish made his recommendations. But-lah should be killed, but not yet. Black Fish said:

“He should be taken from village to village and shown. He
should be made to run the gauntlet in every town. In every town there are parents and mates and children of our dead warriors. They should all whip him for their grief. Let this horse stealer, who was too bold, take the punishment for Boone and all the whitefaces in Kain-tuck-ee!

“If he dies in the gauntlets, that will be well enough. But if he lives through them, let him be taken at last to Wapatomica Town, in the heart of our country, where all the people can go easily to see him burned! That is what should come of this man! This friend of Boone! This horse stealer who came here and troubled our women and children!”

T
HAT NIGHT
T
ECUMSEH SAT BY THE FIRE AND WATCHED HIS
mother work silently and gloomily at her duties. Chiksika had come to eat a little, but then with a fever from the wound in his neck he had gone away to his own little lodge by the river, to rest without children around. Star Watcher had gone with him, to clean his wound and make a new poultice for it. Perhaps then she would go by the
wigewa
of the family of Stands Firm and offer them condolence upon the death of one of their cousins, one of the thirty-seven who had not returned from Kain-tuck-ee. Above all she wanted to be near Stands Firm.

Turtle Mother’s face seemed to have grown slack and heavy and sagged at the jowls. She muttered as she worked. “War has made Chiksika hard. Did you see? He cared not about his little brother’s lost eye. But then he has never cared for the little one.”

“Perhaps he is too troubled because so many friends died.”

She answered without looking up. “The whitefaces have laid a curse over all our country. They have made the people bad.” She worked for a while longer in silence. Then, perhaps feeling Tecumseh’s intense stare on the top of her head, she looked up at him and said, “This big man they have condemned to burn. Do you, my son, believe a man should suffer so much?”

Tecumseh hesitated, not quite sure what he really did believe. It was hard to think that Black Fish and all the other great men in council could be wrong or unfair. But then Tecumseh’s feelings of the last few days returned, and he slowly shook his head.

“To burn men is bad,” his mother said. “But cruel times make good people cruel.” She sighed, then set her mouth hard and looked at the fire, and the fire glinted in her angry eyes. “This white man chose the wrong season to come here and steal horses. He should have stayed out of our country. Too bad for him. But
will torturing and burning him keep more from coming? It would be foolish to hope so.”

A piece of rabbit flesh fell into the fire and began sizzling and flaring. She watched it burn.
“Wapanzo-ah, cut-ta-ho-tha,
” she murmured. “Rabbit, you are condemned to burn up.” She sneered and snorted a laugh through her nose. Then she sighed again.

“We should leave this bad country,” she said.

T
URTLE
M
OTHER STOOD IN MUD BESIDE A LOADED PACKHORSE
in a long line of packhorses and people and looked at her children for what she knew might be the last time. They stood forlorn in the muddy street before her, in front of the
wigewa
that had been their home for more than four years, and her tears blurred their faces. In the days since the terrible decision had been made, her heart had hurt so much that she had hoped it would kill her or grow numb, as other wounds do. But it had not, and she knew it never would. This was the saddest day she had ever lived; it was even more terrible in a way than the time of her husband’s death, because then she had been able to draw some consolation from her children and from the Shawnee people. Now neither could console her. For her children would no longer be with her, and the rest of the People, if they could still be called a people, were inconsolable themselves.

Never since the Beginning, when Our Grandmother and Rounded-Side had created the septs and brought them together as a nation, never during all the nation’s persecutions and migrations, had anyone dreamed that the nation could be divided or defeated by anyone, not even by the Iroquois or the white men. The Shawnee nation had remained strong enough to endure, simply because of its oneness. Sometimes the parts of the tribe had migrated different ways and lived in places far from each other,
but the oneness had not been destroyed. And any Shawnee person had remained strong enough to endure, simply because of his or her inclusion in that oneness.

But the white man’s curse on the Shawnee country had at last penetrated and split even that oneness. The nation had separated along that split line, and on this terrible day the broken parts were moving away from each other. Four thousand warriors and women, children, and old people milled among the laden packhorses, their hearts as chilled and dismal as the mud around their feet, and waited for the column to begin moving west, leaving their own lands forever. Most faces were blank. The breakdown of the nation had left many of the people too stunned to think or to talk of anything but the small details of packing and moving. But from every house came sounds of misery.

This split passed through not only the nation, but through the septs and even through families. Twelve hundred residents of Chillicothe were leaving, but not all the Chalagawthas. Twenty-eight hundred people from the other four septs were going west, but some members of each sept—Kispokos, Thawegilas, Peckuwes, and Maykujays—were staying. Every Shawnee adult was free to choose according to the wisdom of the heart, and each had made the choice: whether to stay in the O-hi-o homelands and contend with the problem of the white people or to go west of the Missi-se-pe and help build a new homeland. Over beyond the Great River the Spanish governor had granted them a parcel of land to settle on, in the land near the Missourias. It was not a very large parcel of land, and no one even looked forward with joy to going there. They were not going to something, they were fleeing from something. A trader named Loramie had made the arrangements and would lead them there, those who had chosen to go.

Turtle Mother, bitter, heart-weary of the whiteface threat, had elected to go with the Kispoko sept of her husband. A large part of the Kispoko had voted to leave, along with most of the Peckuwes and the Thawegilas.

But Chiksika had vowed to stay with his foster father Black Fish and resist the whitefaces. Star Watcher would stay also. She was twenty-one years of age and would marry Stands Firm, who like Chiksika had sworn to fight the Long Knives as long as he drew breath.

Tecumseh’s choice to stay had most rent Turtle Mother’s heart and his own. There had been long, sorrowful talks in their house over the night fires. He had spent days talking with the old grandfathers
about what he should do. At last he had come to his mother and said, “I have the sign. I must stay and serve the People.”

“But we who go are the People as well. Perhaps you are meant to help the People make a new homeland.”

“Mat-tah,
no,” he said. “I was given a promise to keep by my father, and that is not what he wanted me to do.”

Loud Noise, who idolized Tecumseh and who had come to depend upon Star Watcher as much as his mother for pampering and comfort, had whined that he did not want to go away. The other two triplets had wanted nothing but for the family to stay here together as it had always been in their memory.

Finally it had come out this way, that the children would all remain together here, foster children of the Chalagawthas, in this familiar land where the Shawnees were accustomed to making a living and getting food, instead of uprooting to that unknown new place beyond the Missi-se-pe.

Out there, for all anyone knew, the migrating Shawnees might starve and sicken with new diseases before they learned to survive. A move to a new land customarily was made only after long study of sites by the shamans, who would note the plants and the animal populations, the quality of the soil and water and the winds, and make a careful divination of the spirits attendant upon those sites. Though the Shawnees had lived almost everywhere on the land between the Eastern Sea and the Mother of Rivers, they had not moved, like this, without preparation. Who even knew how their strains of seeds would grow on that side of the Missi-se-pe?

So now Turtle Mother was parting from everything good in her life. It was not an ordinary thing to do, this splitting of families, but it could not be seen in the way of usual things because never had the Shawnee nation broken apart before, and now there
were
no usual things, there was just this, which was like the ending of their world. It was as if Kokomthena had finished weaving her seine, and her little dog had failed to unravel it.

There had been many big councils in all the Shawnee towns about this, all through last fall and winter. Chiefs and warriors and women had spoken eloquently about what should be done. The young warriors had snarled and shouted of their hatred for whitefaces. The old men had spoken sadly of the futility of fighting a race of men who poured over the mountains and down the river in growing numbers from some inexhaustible source in the
east, especially now that the Long Knife chief Clark had taken control from the British.