Panther in the Sky (25 page)

His voice was broken by a strange grunt, and Tecumseh glanced aside and saw Black Fish’s leg collapse under him. The chief toppled sideways with his eyes squeezed shut in pain and his teeth bared in a grimace, dropping his musket and clutching at his hip with both hands. Tecumseh was so stunned by this that he forgot about his readied weapon, even about the burning houses and the soldiers. He stood for a moment watching his foster father fall to the ground like a great tree, falling sideways it seemed for a long time before he was on the ground. It was one of those strange and awful moments, like the time when he had felt the earth shake; it was terrible enough to see his great chief and teacher fall in pain; it was even more terrible because for a moment the falling man seemed to be not only Black Fish but Tecumseh himself!

Tecumseh knelt at Black Fish’s side, and other warriors had come to him, too, their faces in the fire-tinged dawn full of anguish and doubt. The shooting and yelling went on everywhere, and the air was thick with smoke. A few yards away a dry-bark
wigewa,
roaring with bright orange flames, caved in, sending up a high swirl of sparks.

Black Fish had been shot in the hip socket. He could not move his leg. A sheen of sweat covered his contorted face, and though his mouth was working he could not yet make a voice because of the pain. It was a frightful wound. Black Fish had several bullet scars on his body, but never before had a wound hurt so much that he had grown faint.

When at last he could say something, it was, “Bring Red Pole.”

And then he let out a long breath and went unconscious.

Tecumseh, still too much a boy to control his sobbing, helped three grim warriors carry Black Fish back toward the council lodge. In the dawn light, dirty gray smoke was darkening the sky over the whole town and drifting among the shabby bark huts. The shooting was still going on back by the burning buildings, but not so much shooting now.

The warriors had brought Red Pole as told to do, but Red Pole was dead.

Now with their chief unconscious and the only present chieftain slain, the warriors and boys had no one to lead them. Those who had been pressing on the Long Knives began to withdraw, following the ones who were carrying Black Fish and Red Pole,
retreating into the heart of the town, shooting back as they came. It seemed to them that there was nothing left to do but get into the council lodge and defend their families until the Long Knives burned it down and killed them all. From what they had seen, the whitefaces numbered about three or four hundred mounted men. There was no hope. The rest of the warriors were not expected to return from the council for many days.

“I killed two,” one of the warriors was saying as they carried Red Pole’s body. “Maybe I can kill ten more before the end of this.”

When Black Fish woke up on a bed of blankets in the crowded council lodge, he asked for Red Pole, saying he would now have to lead. They told him that Red Pole had been killed. He groaned. “Then I must continue.”

He had to clench his teeth to keep the pain from pulling him under again. He listened. There was no more shooting. He said, “They do not come yet?”

A warrior who had crept back to watch the Long Knives came and told Black Fish what a strange thing was happening. “They burn houses one by one. Before they set the torch, they go in and carry everything out. They make piles of all this and then they burn down the houses.”

Black Fish grimaced. “Such a people! But do they come on?”

The scout replied: “When they saw me they threw themselves on the ground behind those piles of things, and some of them shot at me. Maybe we have made them timid. I think they are too busy stealing things and burning houses to come in and fight us. Maybe they do not know how few we are.”

Black Fish was keeping himself as steady as the pain would allow. Change-of-Feathers had dressed the wound. The bones of the socket had been shattered. It was a very unfortunate wound, one that could never be repaired. Change-of-Feathers had a secret medicine made from a woods flower that could dull pain, but it also dulled the mind, so Black Fish would not take any now because he had to keep commanding. Black Fish through the hum of pain could hear the voices of the frightened people in the lodge and the wail of babies. From the southeast came the faint yells of the whiteface looters and the rush and crackle of tinder-dry houses burning. Smoke hung like fog in the sultry air of a hot, windless summer morning.

Black Fish raised his right hand and swept it slowly in an arc, pointing to each warrior and boy in the semicircle before him. “Keep watching the soldiers. See if they have surrounded the
town. Get the women and children ready to go up the river and out through the ravine, if that way is open. They can flee on to Piqua Town if the Long Knives try to come farther into town. We will fight from this lodge and delay them as long as we can. Where is my gun?”

A warrior said, “I brought it, Father. It is there behind you. I reloaded it for you.”

“Good.” He winced. The pain was making his breathing very uneven, and he was drenched with sweat. He saw Tecumseh there and smiled. “You came to fight. I saw you near me. Did you shoot any?”

Tecumseh shook his head. “When you fell, I forgot, Father.”

“Eh. Come. Sit here by me. Stay with me while we wait and see what that serpent spawn of a people are going to do. What fools they must be, not to come on. Or cowards. Do they have no leader? We have some luck, I say. Whoever their chief, it is not Boone or But-lah or Clark. Those would not hesitate like this.” He groaned again, clenched his teeth, and wiped sweat off his face with the palm of his hand. “Now go out and watch all they do. Shoot at them and yell like a hundred if they try to come farther. And always bring me news. Tecumseh, my son. Hold my hand a while. There is no need for you to go out there. You are meant to live far beyond this day. You will be needed enough before we are done with white men.”

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF THE MORNING THE WHITEFACE SOLDIERS
were so laden with loot that they could not even burn any houses. They had loaded their own horses and had rounded up more than a hundred Indian horses. Black Fish listened in disbelief as his warriors told him that the army was leaving the burned part of town and going back the way they had come. Aside from Red Pole, not a single Shawnee had been killed by this mounted army. Only a few of their bullets had hit the council house. Yet they were going away!

Now a murderous smile came onto Black Fish’s hard mouth. His eyes, which had been dull with pain, glittered again. He had his two dozen adult warriors summoned to him, and he told them:

“Get horses from the corral by the river. Follow the whitefaces, as wolves follow the bison. Stay hidden. Shoot them in the back. If they turn to fight, disappear. It is a long way to Kain-tuck-ee, and they are loaded with loot. They will be slow. Follow and kill them. Follow as far as you please. Maybe only white
ghosts will ride home to Kain-tuck-ee. It is good that they came so stupidly. What did they do after coming so far? They burned empty houses and did some thievery. I wish I could ride with you and watch them fall along the trail. Go. Weshemoneto guards you and helps you today because what you do is right. You are like the bees whose honey has been stolen. You will go out and sting. Go and do it.”

The warriors were stirred, hot-eyed, eager to go after their enemies even though they were twenty to one. Tecumseh sat and looked at Black Fish’s profile as he told them all this. A shiver of emotion passed down Tecumseh’s cheeks when Black Fish spoke of the bees and the honey and the rightness. Here was truth. Black Fish was one of those great chiefs who could arouse men to do anything, with true words about right purposes. This, Tecumseh just now realized, was a great power. It was as important as strength itself.

B
Y THE TIME THE TWO DOZEN WARRIORS HAD RETURNED THE
next day, they had made the whitefaces pay with much blood for their honey. The little party of warriors brought back thirty scalps of soldiers they had killed, and they had wounded another sixty or seventy soldiers. By following and sniping as Black Fish had told them to do, they had made casualties of a third or a fourth of the Long Knife army. These two dozen warriors had done more harm to these Long Knife soldiers than hundreds of warriors had done in all their raids against the Kain-tuck-ee forts. Black Fish was pleased. It would be easier to die now, having won something.

Though he was not bleeding heavily or wounded in any vital parts, it was a mortal wound. The infection fire had started in his hip, and even if it had not, this was the kind of pain that eventually would wear a man down until there was nothing left of him.

In the Hunter’s Moon, after having suffered harder and longer than anyone had been known to suffer, Black Fish died. It was a time of greatest desolation. The Shawnees had grown to love him even as they had grown to love the great Cornstalk, and his burial made them feel that the whole earth lay crushing their hearts. Tecumseh and his brothers and sister were orphans again for the second time in five years.

The soul of Black Fish did not go into the ground with his body. It flowed into Blue Jacket and Black Snake and Black Hoof and Stands Firm and Chiksika and every other warrior and chieftain who had stayed east of the Missi-se-pe, even into the boy Tecumseh,
and there it grew to be like a thundercloud. When the time came for this thundercloud to storm, it would cleanse the country of whitefaces, it would rinse out the valley of the Beautiful River with blood. That was the vow they made in their hearts at the grave of Black Fish.

M
ANY MORE BOATS WERE ON THE
B
EAUTIFUL
R
IVER SINCE
Clark’s victory. And so Chiksika and other young warriors took out some of their lust for revenge by going down to the O-hi-o and ambushing flatboats. They did not bother to take prisoners. They killed everyone, looted the boats, and burned or sank them. Their fury over the death of Black Fish had overwhelmed any mercy they might have felt toward the white people.

But Star Watcher said when he came home, “You killed women and children?”

“I did not myself kill any woman or child,” Chiksika answered. “I was busy killing the men.” He did not look at her eyes.

“But you did not stop the others from killing women and children?”

“I told you, I was busy fighting white men,” he muttered.

“I am not proud of you,” she told him, and he looked down.

Tecumseh was astonished that Star Watcher had said that.

Most of what the warriors brought back from these raids were only the things useful in hunting and war: guns, powder, lead, blankets, warm clothing, bullet molds, knives, and swords. They also sometimes brought silver money and tobacco and axes and farm tools and seed. Sometimes they found barrels and bottles of rum or whiskey, but they did not bring these home, except in their aching heads and bloodshot eyes and reeking breath.

Chiksika, after scalping a fat white man he had stabbed to death, had brought the white man’s rifle home for Tecumseh, who was now old enough for it. It was a much better weapon than the British musket he had brought him from the council. This was a long rifle with a striped-maple stock inlaid with a star-and-moon design of brass. It was a better gun than Chiksika himself possessed, but his first impulse had been to give it to his brother, so he kept his own old rifle and presented this fine one to Tecumseh.

Also among the things found on that boat had been about a hundred of the squarish things the French priests carried around and called
livres.
Chiksika had picked up several of them and examined them, opening their stiff covers and letting their white leaves flutter in the wind, studying the strange, tiny, black markings.
He thought Tecumseh might be interested in seeing some of these, particularly those with pictures in them of men and women in strange clothes. But they were heavy things; just a few would weigh down an arm. So he took only two and threw the rest into the river.

Tecumseh found these items very intriguing and laughed with Chiksika at the odd whitefaces in the pictures inside. But of course the gun was of first importance. There was time now for Chiksika to teach him how to use it well. As for the
livres,
Chiksika said:

“Hide them away in your bed. Someday we might take them to Blue Jacket, who knows the language of their talking leaves, and maybe he can tell us about them. They are not important now. But do not let Loud Noise play with them. He would probably tear them up.” Chiksika had less and less liking for the little boy now; though he told Tecumseh to protect him and help him, he himself was disgusted with the child’s cunning, whining nature.

Lead and gunpowder were always too scarce to be wasted on practice shooting at inanimate targets. The Shawnees hoarded every pinch of powder not used for hunting, so that they would have enough if another Long Knife army came. “The reason we did not defeat the Long Knives at the Kanawha-se-pe,” he told Tecumseh, “was because we ran out of powder.” Therefore, Tecumseh’s first familiarization with the gun involved aiming and snapping the trigger without load. Then Chiksika said, “Now you will learn to measure and load in the powder and ball. And when it is loaded we will ride down the river and see if you can kill some meat with it. Here. You see the little horn tip tied to the big powder horn? That little one holds just enough powder to load the gun one time. So pour from the big horn into the little horn, and then pour it from the little horn down the barrel. Careful. Do not spill any. Good. Now here. Put this patch of cloth across the muzzle hole and then press the ball down into it with your thumb. Now hold the ramrod like this and start pushing the ball down the barrel. Hold the rod in the middle at first, or it could bend and break. Keep pushing. Sometimes it is hard. Keep on. Push till you feel it stop against the powder.”

Tecumseh, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth with his concentration, said, “I could shoot ten arrows in the time I need to load this.”