Panther in the Sky (32 page)

“How can you say your cousin Clark is good, when he does this?”

Copper Hair’s friendly smile wavered. But then he put a hand on Tecumseh’s shoulder and said: “Just as well, how can you say your fathers Black Fish and Black Hoof were good, when they went to Kain-tuck-ee, and burned towns and caught white families?”

The answer to that was quicker than Copper Hair must have expected. Tecumseh said: “This is our country, given to us by Weshemoneto. Kain-tuck-ee was not theirs. They had no right to make towns there.”

“But,” said Copper Hair, “what if the white man’s God tells them He is giving them Kain-tuck-ee? They will believe Him if He tells them that, and they will not feel they do wrong.”

This was an astonishing thought. All Tecumseh could say was, “It would be a lie! Does even the white man’s God lie? It is not His to give!”

Copper Hair blinked and shook his head. “Do you think a God can be wrong?”

Tecumseh stood before Copper Hair, breathing hard, confused.
All around, warriors were rushing, women were carrying things, people were leading packhorses. The air was full of cries, shouts, dust. At last Tecumseh asked:

“In your heart, are you Shawnee?”

A strange, wild, pained look was in Copper Hair’s eyes. “Tecumseh,” he said in a voice almost choking, “I have been happy among the People. They accepted me, and I have belonged. Yes. You are my brother. I wanted to talk to you.…”

“I was bringing the books to you, Copper Hair. That is why I was coming to Piqua Town. I wanted to know …” But before he could speak what he was going to say, he suddenly saw Copper Hair with a gray face and bloody lips.

And then the young man reached out and put his hand on Tecumseh’s shoulder and said, “Maybe we will have a time someday for the books. Maybe there will not be a battle here.… Maybe … Listen, young brother. I must go now. They told me to be in the fort. Whatever comes from this day, I am your brother. Remember that. I will watch for you.”

These words twisted Tecumseh’s heart, because he knew that Copper Hair would be dead. He had seen him dead, and he somehow knew it would be so. But he replied:

“I will watch for you, too.”

E
ARLY IN THE AFTERNOON A CHATTER OF DRUMS COULD BE
heard down by the fording place of the Mad River, and then the army of Clark was seen coming across the ford, riding through the shallow green water, their weapons glinting, their flags limp in the still, humid air. After the troop of horsemen came an endless line of men on foot, in gray and brown shirts or some only in breechcloths in the Indian fashion, holding their guns across their chests as they waded across. After them came more horsemen and then four horses pulling a brass cannon, whose big iron-rimmed wheels could be heard grinding over the rocky riverbank. The drums chattered ominously, and men’s voices shouted commands. When the army was across the river and half a mile from the south edge of Piqua Town, a big man in a blue coat, riding a gray horse, pointed his sword this way and that and shouted in a mighty voice that rolled through the valley, and large parts of the army moved this way and that in orderly patterns, spreading out to make a long double line along the pole fences and the fields of high corn in the rich bottomlands. It was frightening to hear those strange drums, drums that chattered instead of bumping like a heartbeat, and to see men move so obediently, so many
of them, as if they were outreaching parts of that horseman in the blue coat, who was surely the dreaded Clark. Tecumseh looked at him in the distance and thought of how it was that he had come here where his own cousin was. Tecumseh had kept his promise and had told no one, not even Chiksika, that Copper Hair was a cousin of this Clark.

Tecumseh was on the edge of the high rock bluff. From here he could see over the bark roofs of the town along the whole bend of the river, and the wide corn fields and bean fields and gardens beyond them, and the Long Knife army forming its straight lines. From this distance they looked like an army of ants lining up. The valley was steamy from the rains, and deep green were the meadows of grass and weeds where the army was. Nearer to the town there was another ant-size army moving, a hundred warriors running swiftly into the corn fields, running crouched down, to make a line that would face the Long Knives’ lines. Between the meadows and the town there were several little wooded hillocks. Farther east, closer to the river, another long line of warriors was running crouched along a fence row to make a defense between the town and the river. Somewhere among those warriors were Chiksika and Stands Firm of his own family. In town near the river was the three-sided palisade fort with its hewn-log blockhouse, built by the British not long ago. There were houses on two sides of it, and a field of corn grew almost to its north wall.

Tecumseh was here on this bluff because, though still not old enough to serve as a warrior, he did have a horse and a gun and a pair of the keenest eyes, and he had been assigned with other boys his age to watch and protect the rear of the procession of women and children and old people who had fled up the ravine into the woods on the high ground. Except for a few of the oldest and fattest, who were still clambering up the ravine, most of the people were in the woods now and moving along the path that led northwestward between the forks of the Great Miami-se-pe. There was really no destination for the people now; they were going northward simply because this would take them farther from the Long Knives.

As Tecumseh looked over the valley and watched the warriors and the enemy moving into their positions, he saw a cluster of trees near the Indian lines on his left, a clump of trees where a brooklet ran out and down to a creek, and he knew that it was the place of his birth and of his Vision Quest. Remembering this, seeing the green woods and the corn fields and the curving river
and the houses and the beautiful bluffs, he felt such a longing for the peace the People had known before the white men that he groaned aloud. Then he heard a croaking voice behind him. Startled, he turned. An old man stood there, one of the village subchiefs, one who was in charge of the withdrawal of the people, and he was summoning Tecumseh. “Come, my son. We need you with us.” And so Tecumseh turned away from the wide panorama of the valley with its little antlike figures getting into their places for battle, mounted his pony, and started following the refugees. He had gone only a few hundred paces when the crackle of gunfire rolled up from the valley, and faint sounds of shouting. It was starting.

S
TAR
W
ATCHER CARRIED A KETTLE AND SOME BLANKETS
and a bag of corn and led a packhorse that carried the rest of her household. She had ordered the triplets not to wander far from the packhorse or lag behind.

As she went along she could not see well sometimes because of the blur of tears that would start when she let herself think of what was happening. She kept remembering the bright flames beginning to consume the house in Chillicothe that she had built only that spring. Now that house would be just ashes. And the corn and vegetables that she had planted in the fields around Chillicothe would be just ashes and trampled pulp by now. And the man who had lived with her in that nice new house for those few happy weeks, maybe he would be dead or hurt by now. There was such a thunder of gunfire rolling up from the valley. How could men live long in that?

For a long time through the afternoon the people of Chillicothe and Piqua moved together in their long column, the gunfire growing fainter behind them. Many of the women were weeping voicelessly; the faces of the children were puckered with fear.

Riding in the dust at the tail of the column, Tecumseh kept looking back. He kept thinking of Chiksika and Stands Firm and Black Hoof, who would be always bold and in danger, and wondered if they could still be alive. He thought about Thick Water, who was back there now in his first battle. He thought too of Copper Hair, who had said he would be in the fort. Maybe they had wanted him to be in the fort because they had sensed, as Tecumseh had, that Copper Hair was not a Shawnee through his soul.

After a long time, the battle sounds could hardly be heard through the sounds of the refugees’ retreat: the hooves on the ground, the swish of legs through weeds and grass, the creak and
drag of travois poles, the blowing of the horses as they plodded through the heat, the whimpering or whining of thirsty, tired, scared children, a little talk, and around it all the dry creak and shrill of late summer insects.

Then there was something else: a thump on the air. Then again. Again. They knew what it was. An old man said:

“May I never hear another rolling-gun. It is revenge for the British rolling-gun that we suffer now.”

Star Watcher, like many women whose husbands and brothers were still back in Piqua Town, remembered the demonstration of the British cannon, its great spout of flame and smoke, the woodpile flying apart, and her face crumpled with anguish.

They kept moving on.

And when the sun set red in the haze, and dusk came, they stopped the procession on a high meadow, made a camp without fires, and put boys with bows and guns around the perimeter to guard it. The people ate jerky and cold corn cake and waited, looking back toward the south, looking and wondering and fearing as the stars came out.

And when it was dark, they saw what they had feared to see.

The sky in the south was red. As Chillicothe had burned the night before, Piqua was burning now.

T
HE WARRIORS ARRIVED BEFORE MIDNIGHT
. M
ANY WERE
wounded. They brought five dead warriors they had been able to get off the battlefield and the bodies of two who had died on the way from Piqua Town, and they said that another fifteen had been killed whose bodies could not be recovered. The white soldiers had scalped and mutilated those bodies.

The warriors had taken the scalps of about fifteen soldiers and had killed a few more soldiers whose scalps they could not get.

Tecumseh and Star Watcher ran among the grim warriors in the darkness, calling Chiksika’s name and Stands Firm’s name, afraid they would not be there.

But they were. Both were all bloody but were able to walk and talk. Black Hoof had escaped injury many times, by the protection of the Great Good Spirit. Thick Water was unhurt.

But Piqua Town had fallen. And the soldiers had set it on fire.

Black Hoof said the women should build cookfires to make hot food and broth and poultices. The army would not follow in the dark, he said. They were too busy looting and burning Piqua. And they probably would not come on tomorrow, either, because the battle had lasted until dusk, and the soldiers had not had time
yet to destroy the crops. There was of course a danger that the Long Knives would come in pursuit of the People, but if they did, the scouts could give warning in plenty of time.

So, fires were built, small fires which in the midst of the dark woods and meadows made the people feel a little like a People again, and helped them doctor their warriors and comfort their children, and whose smoke helped to keep away mosquitoes.

Stands Firm’s face and shoulders were cut and punctured in a dozen places. Chiksika had two wounds on his shoulder and chest. While Star Watcher made poultices in her kettle and cleaned their wounds, Chiksika and Stands Firm told of the defeat. Chiksika said, “No such battle was ever fought on this side of the Beautiful River. To me it was the equal of our great battle at the Kanawha-se-pe.”

“Black Hoof was a great war chief today,” said Stands Firm. “It was not his fault that Piqua Town fell. The Long Knives were three times our number. And this Clark could turn his army by his voice, so we could never get around his flank. By the afternoon we had been driven back into the houses and the fort. Then his cannon knocked them all to pieces.”

“And this,” said Chiksika, “was the most terrible thing of all: when the cannon fired those great loads of bullets! It was like a hailstorm of lead balls and splinters, and no one could hide from them.”

“All of these holes in me are from one bang of that kind,” Stands Firm said, and he tried to smile at the sick look on Star Watcher’s face.

Very late in the day it had been discovered that a second wing of Clark’s army was coming down the river.

“We heard their bugles and drums coming,” Chiksika said.

“Such a sound they make!” Stands Firm exclaimed. “Like mad spirits!”

“Black Hoof tried one more time to turn back the Long Knives before they could catch us between them,” Chiksika said. “We all ran straight toward their cannon and rifles. We got so close I could see the face of Clark. I knew him from Harrod’s Fort in Kain-tuck-ee. He stood straight up and pointed his sword at us and shouted in his great voice, and there came so many gunshots at once that we could not go on. All we could do then was help our hurt ones get back. Then we withdrew through the corn field by the fort and came under the bluff, and up the ravine the way you came, just before that other part of his army could close on us. And that was all the battle. It was almost dark, and we got
away and came. And that is all. And now you see that the sky is red and there will be no Piqua Town anymore.”

The story was being told around every fire. Voices were murmuring everywhere amid the twinkling fires, and the women and children and old people were listening wide-eyed, loving the warriors for their courage. Though it had been a severe defeat, there was no shame in the way the warriors had fought for the town, and as long as there were fires and families here and the warriors had nothing to be ashamed of, it was still a People. They could feel it out here in the open, the oneness, even though they were without a place. They had not felt like a People since the nation had divided the year before, but now they did.

Tecumseh noticed the white boy Big Fish standing in the margin of the firelight, a white-skinned boy in Shawnee dress, looking strained and afraid. That was no wonder. It had been only weeks since he had been captured in Kain-tuck-ee, and today the white men’s army from Kain-tuck-ee had come and done all this, and maybe he wondered if the People would turn on him and kill him. His foster father Black Hoof was too busy to attend to him now. Tecumseh could almost feel the boy’s doubts, just by looking at him. Big Fish gave Tecumseh a feeble half smile and raised his hand slightly to greet him, and Tecumseh raised his hand in reply. Big Fish then wandered away, looking very lost.