Panther in the Sky (3 page)

“May we be strong by doing what is right,” she repeated.

Then he mounted, without even seeming to favor his wounded arm, and rode off up the road toward the fording place, not looking back.

Stands Firm was turning away to his horse, to follow Tecumseh. Star Watcher grabbed his arm fiercely and made him look at her. She said, “I do not see Thick Water with him. Is he killed?” Thick Water was Tecumseh’s most tenacious bodyguard, always so close by him that Tecumseh now seemed like a man without his shadow; Thick Water’s absence seemed an omen, as if Weshemoneto had withdrawn his cloak of protection from around her brother.

Stands Firm replied: “No. Tecumseh sent him away.”

She shuddered. Somehow this sounded even more ominous than if the bodyguard had been killed in the battle yesterday. “Why did he send him away?
Wahsiu,
my husband! What do you think?”

“He told him to go bring back some Wyandots who had deserted us. He tried also to send me away from him, to send me to stay by you and help you with these people.”

She hung tight to his sleeve.
“Wahsiu,
” she hissed at him, her eyes wild with doubt, “what is the bad thing that you are not saying out loud?”

He drew his arm out of her grasp. “My wife, I must go.…”

She remembered her brother’s war paint, the red and the black, and she guessed. Her eyes drilling into her husband’s, she demanded:

“He had a sign?” She was thinking of the foreknowledge of death that her father and her older brother had taken into battle with them on their last days.
“He had a sign?”
She almost squealed the question at him, leaning forward and starting to tremble. The little boy beside her whimpered.

“By our fire last night a red leaf fell upon him from a tree. All of us with him heard the noise of a bullet, though no gun was shot anywhere. Then he told us that he will fall today. Yes,
neewa,”
Stands Firm groaned, his lips drawn in a grimace, his eyes wet and squinting, “he had a sign, yes!”

She recoiled as if she had been shot. Then she lashed out with her work-hardened hand and clouted the side of his head, screaming at him, “Say no!” Passing warriors turned to look.

He tasted blood, and his ear rang from the impact. She had never struck him before, nor anyone, not even children. He grabbed her wrist before she could slap him again and forced her trembling arm down to her side. His heart was quaking, as was her whole body.

“Forgive me,
wahsiu,”
she groaned. “I want you to say he had no sign.”

“That I know you want. But he did. Now you must let me go on. When we fight the Long Knives today he wants me beside him in Thick Water’s place.”

“Now you lie! You said before that he tried to send you away!”

“He did try to. But then he had the sign and saw in it that I might save him if he falls.”

She tried to find hope in this, but hope was faint. She struggled to make herself calm. “Then go, my husband. Be strong. Do what you can if it happens. I pray for your safety as I always have done. Your heart and mine are one heart.” She could hardly speak but had to tell him these things before he went into battle. He was as good a husband as any woman had ever married, though he had spent most of the years of their marriage in the farthest corners of-the land, helping Tecumseh try to unite the tribes. Star Watcher and Stands Firm gripped their right hands together almost until they hurt, and he pressed his forehead against her temple. She shut her eyes, and the eyelids stung with salt.

Then he was gone from her side, and when she opened her eyes he was swinging onto his horse’s back as nimbly as a young warrior, and the horse was already kicking up mud, surging into a gallop up the road, her old husband going off with a hope of protecting her brother, while she, fearing that there was not a hope, put her hands under the little boy’s arms and lifted him onto the pommel of her saddle. She swung on behind him, saying, “Come, now. Your mother wants you so much.” She saw Open Door riding far ahead already, going toward the missionary town, knowing nothing of Tecumseh’s sign. The little boy at last spoke:

“Ai, I am cold!”

“Yes, you are cold. But do you know there is a secret way to make yourself never feel cold again? You can learn it when you get a little older. The warriors and grandfathers know the secret, but you have to be old enough to learn.” She talked to the child to keep from flying out of her head. She remembered when the boy Tecumseh had learned the secret on the coldest day in anyone’s memory, and how his body and hands had always given off warmth after he learned it. How will such good secrets be taught, she wondered, if the Long Knives win? When you have no home, you forget everything, even who you are.

Then she remembered that Tecumseh’s hand had been cold today, and her hope grew smaller still.

She rode through the column of hundreds of warriors of many tribes who were following her doomed brother up the road to ford the river to the battleground, the Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots, Potawatomies, Ottawas, Ojibways, Menominees, Delawares, Sauks, Foxes, Kickapoos, Winnebagoes, Senecas, even Sioux and Creeks from places far west and south, the broadest brotherhood of nations any chief had ever united for any cause, those who had been with him for many seasons and those who had come to join him after he had proven he could shake the world. They rode and trotted along toward a battle in which they all could expect to die, their weapons rattling, their bone and quill and silver ornaments chattering and jingling, their faces painted with stripes and dots and circles, robes and leathers flapping, following her brother to go and fight still again the American army of Harrison the land stealer.

Star Watcher talked to the little boy as she rode past the warriors to catch up with the refugees, the mothers and wives and sisters and children of all these warriors who might die today. “We must be with our families,” she told the boy. “We must live on, and not forget the good things we know. Weshemoneto the Great Good Spirit favors our People. Though the white man’s God is strong, the Master of Life knows we are right, and gives us Tecumseh to save us.”

“I am
cold,”
groaned the little boy.

She held the blanket tight around him and hugged him closer to her belly. “Did you know, I was holding my mother when Tecumseh was born? Did you know, I first saw the shooting star that went over when he was born? Oh, yes,” she groaned, “he was like my own little boy, and Our Grandmother the Creator told me what to teach him to make him good and kind.… For when the Panther’s Eye shot through the sky, it was foretold that
he would be good and full of vision, and the strongest of all our leaders.” She bit her upper lip and breathed deep breaths. And then she said, in a voice that sounded softer in her own head:

“That was in the ending of the Time Before. Yes, when the Long Knives were still on the other side of the Beautiful River. Yes! Yes, what a happy people we were in the Time Before! Sometime we will be happy again, for everything comes back around.… Oh, let me try to tell you how beautiful and terrible was the Panther Star on that night.…”

She was remembering the first time she had seen the life that was Tecumseh, remembering it because now she believed that she had seen him alive for the last time. And through the blur of her tears as she rode and talked, everything was muddy brown and gray, and the falling leaves were little drifting smears of gold and red.

In her mind she saw Tecumseh’s red-and-black face. And his white smile, like light through clouds.

Everything comes back around.
He is still alive and believes that he can win this day, she thought. He believes that he can kill our greatest enemy on this day. He means to do this even though he expects to die!

“The shooting star,” she said to the little boy, “was the color of his eyes. The color of a panther’s eyes, when a panther crosses your path and turns to look at you.…”

T
URTLE
M
OTHER SQUATTED, NAKED AND SWEATY, IN THE
center of the birth hut. Her daughter knelt at her right and an old midwife at her left.

The pain returned with its rushing sound. The light of the little campfire outside the hut blurred in Turtle Mother’s sight and became two campfires, moving apart from each other and then together again. She gripped the center post of the hut and groaned, and pushed down with all the strength of her torso. Her breathing was fast and hard. She pressed as if she must turn herself inside out. She felt as if she would die of this. But with her first two she had felt as if she would die, too, and had not, so she was not afraid. Still, even knowing she would not die of this, she felt as if she would.

Then the pain drew back a little way, and Turtle Mother squatted there with her hands still on the post and drew slow breaths. Sweat was coursing down her cheeks, growing cool in the night air, and the coolness felt good. She was aware of her daughter’s hands as they pressed and stroked her flanks and eased the pain. The girl’s hands were gentle and cool, but strong.

As the rushing sound of the pain lessened, the sounds of the night came to her ears again. She heard the piping of the little tree frogs. She heard Wind Spirit whispering high in the treetops outside the shelter, the spring trickling through its rocks nearby, and in the distance the quickening beats of a drumming grouse. She heard the voice of her husband, Pucsinwah, Hard Striker, who was talking with their son Chiksika beside the campfire outside the hut.

Her daughter’s hand now stroked her brow and wiped sweat out of her eyes. The girl had moved closer around in front of her. The girl’s eye reflected firelight for a moment as she moved, then her thick hair shadowed it. She was only ten years old, but already
she was like a woman in the wisdom of her heart, and she understood, the way an animal understands, without word teaching, the coming of life. Thus she knew how to help and soothe her mother in the labor of birth instead of being afraid and helpless. For a moment, Turtle Mother was able to smile at her daughter. Then the mighty coming-down began again, and her smile turned to a grimace, and she turned her head aside, and again the firelight shimmered and divided. This time the pain was greater and longer, and it forced noises from her throat, awful noises.

Hard Striker by the fire outside heard his wife’s pain and feared for her. Though he was the principal war chief of all the Shawnees, he was a man who felt the pain in others. Turtle Mother was a perfect wife for a man, but birth was always uncommonly hard for her, and each time she gave him a child he was afraid he would lose her. Looking toward the shelter, he said to his son Chiksika, “A man cannot know how that feels.”

It was not the kind of thing that a father would have tried to express to an ordinary boy of twelve. But Chiksika, like his sister, was wise and good beyond his age. His name meant “the Chickasaw,” for he had been born while his parents traveled through the lands of that nation, down in the southern lands beyond the hunting grounds of Kain-tuck-ee. Chiksika was as near manhood and ready to become a warrior as most boys were at sixteen or seventeen. He listened well to everything his father said and tried to understand it all.

Now Hard Striker said to him, “I have felt the hurt of a musket ball in my body, and of the tomahawk several times. But surely a woman’s pain is worse than those.” He squinted and looked toward the shelter. When he spoke again his voice was thick with feeling. “Sometimes you will hear men and boys make mockery of women, saying they are weak and silly. My son, never let your lips speak such things.”

“No, Father. I promise.”

Hard Striker drew a small leather bag from under his robe, a bag decorated with quillwork. He shut his eyes and moved his lips, making a silent incantation. The firelight gleamed on the planes and ridges of his craggy face. Raising his hand high, he shook the medicine bag to make its contents rattle. Two of the items in the bag were dried snippets from the birth cords of his first two children. Every man chose for himself what was good medicine to carry, and to Hard Striker the bond of his family was the best of all things. He sensed that life was a form of fire, that the bodies of people were a way of containing the sacred fire of
the sun and carrying it about on the earth, and that the fire was kept by woman and passed on to the next generation somehow through this cord. So the cord was powerful and good medicine. Now he passed the bag back and forth through the smoke of the campfire, praying. After a while he put the bag away. He glanced toward the shelter and thought with tenderness of what his wife and daughter were sharing in that dim place. The girl herself would someday have to suffer this same pain, before many years, he knew, because she would be beautiful like her mother, and her man would want to be upon her often. Hard Striker wondered who that man would be. He felt time moving, going around. He remembered when his daughter had been born. Now she was old enough to help at another child’s birth. And before many years she would be bearing. She was called Sky Watcher, because she had seemed to be staring hard at the sky when she first opened her eyes. The chief, remembering that, looked up at the starry sky through the still-leafless trees. It was good to have a clear look at the stars and to be in the quiet of the woods instead of in a town at the time of a birth, because the
unsoma
were clearer and more true when the world was quiet. For this reason Hard Striker liked to build a birth shelter away from the smoke and noise of towns for his wife when she bore children. The
unsoma
were the name-signs that came at the time of a child’s birth or in the ten days following it. The
unsoma
were brought by the Messenger Spirits, and one had to be alert to detect them and not catch a wrong sign. It was necessary to be open to the signs no matter what else was on one’s mind, and there was a great deal now on Hard Striker’s mind.