Panther in the Sky (35 page)

When Chiksika stood on this high place, he felt that he might be on the other side of the Circle of Time, like those brave ancestors, and it seemed to him that it could be done again.

T
HIS SPRING AND THIS SUMMER THE WARRIORS SUFFERED NO
defeats, and they wrought much damage on the whites. The Shawnees’ spirit began to heal, and most of the tribe moved back down to the old beloved townsites at Chillicothe and Piqua and planted crops in the same fields the Long Knives had burned. Everybody worked, even boys, to rebuild the towns from the ashes. The crops grew well because of the burning of the fields. The world seemed less bad now. Soon the People could resume their games and ceremonies and the dances and storytelling they so loved.

Black Hoof was glad for this happiness he saw returning in his people. His noble face was warm, and he talked to encourage that happiness. But behind his glittering black eyes dwelt the realistic mind. He knew that for every boatload of white people his warriors destroyed, ten or twenty more went on unmolested to Kain-tuck-ee. The places that had been forts two years ago and towns a year ago were becoming cities, and where there had been only solitary cabins, there were now towns that would also become cities. A chief could only guess how many settlers had poured into the Sacred Hunting Ground of Kain-tuck-ee this year, but Black Hoof thought his own guess of five to seven thousand was not too large.

And a place that had so many people, he knew, would be able to raise bigger and stronger armies to fight the red men.

When the Shawnee nation had divided, Black Hoof had been one of the chiefs who had vowed to stay and defend the homeland forever. But sometimes now he would stand at the door of his lodge and look along the street at the little town of a few hundred bark huts, and he would think how few Shawnees there were, indeed, how few red men, and he would think:

What will it be to defend our land next year when ten thousand more whites occupy Kain-tuck-ee, and the next year after that, when a hundred thousand more are there, and there will be thousands
of them to the west of us in the Missi-se-pe valley, and they keep crowding into O-hi-o from the east?

And he would sigh. And then a woman and a child would walk up the street on the way to their garden, chatting happily, and they would nod and smile at him, and he would remember how they had looked last fall, crying, fleeing the burning towns. He would smile back at them, as a chief had to do.

L
OUD
N
OISE WAS FOLLOWING A TORTOISE ALONG THE EDGE
of a meadow, watching its ponderous, heavy movements, which were rather like his own, when he heard a deep droning sound nearby. Looking up, he saw dark specks darting in and out of a hole in the trunk of a dead oak. Bees. It was a honey tree!

At once he forgot the tortoise. Loud Noise was mad about maple sugar and papaws and honey, honey most of all. He would do almost anything, risk any punishment or censure, to steal a little of it from the
wigewa
of anyone who had some, to dig off a chunk of honeycomb and eat it, even just to stick his finger in and lick it.

Here, he realized, was a tree with probably handfuls of honey in it, and apparently no one else knew about it. He grew so excited looking at it that he started drooling and his body began to tremble. He edged up close to the tree and determined that the hole would be easy to reach into, if he climbed to a thick old limb that stuck out of the trunk about a man’s height off the ground.

But as he stood next to the tree, the bees’ drone began to sound very menacing. They shot in and out like little bullets and came so close around him that a few times he could feel the fanned air off their little wings.

Loud Noise had been stung by bees and hornets a few times in his life, when he had touched or stepped on them unexpectedly, and once he had sat on a wasp in the
wigewa,
and he could remember all too well the sudden, burning pain of their stings. Quickly he trotted away from the bee tree to a safe distance and stood looking at it, wondering what to do. He was not one of those boys who, like Tecumseh, would bear pain.

And yet one of the worst kinds of pain he could think of would be the pain of knowing that this honey tree was here and that he could not have the honey, and that somebody else might find it and get it.

There were two ways the village boys usually got honey. The most reckless of them would simply tear or chop away the wood to enlarge the hole, then reach in and dig out fistfuls of honey
as fast as they could, taking the mad stings as the price of the delicious treasure. More cautious boys would build a smudge fire to stun the bees first. A drawback to this method was that first one must bring or make fire; another was that it was hard to smoke out bees in secret. Anyone who tried to smoke a bee tree usually ended up having to share the honey with many accomplices or onlookers who had been attracted by the smoke. The Shawnees had not had much experience with honeybees. It was believed that bees had come to the land only a few generations ago; it was believed they had been brought by the white men, and that they had escaped and found hollow trees to live in all over the land. Loud Noise knew nothing of all this; all he knew was that he was mad about honey, and that he must devise a way to get it all.

The idea of smoking the bees and attracting everyone’s attention to the bee tree did not seem a much better way to get the honey than the first, terribly painful way, which was out of the question. And so it seemed necessary to think of an entirely new way to get honey out of a tree, and he stood thinking and drooling. He thought of the turtle and wondered if he might somehow make himself a shell of bark or something to protect his whole body from stings. But with such a shell, even if he could make one, and even if he could climb the tree with it, his hands and face would still be vulnerable to stings. No. That would not work. He did not know whether bees could sting through ordinary deerskin clothing but suspected that they could and did not want to test it.

At last he gave up trying to invent and thought about his brother Cat Follower, and a plan came to mind. It was a plan by which he might have to share some of the honey, but if he dealt properly with Cat Follower, he might not have to share quite half of it, and maybe even less. Loud Noise turned and headed toward the town to find his brother. He found him near the riverbank with some of the other boys, engaged in a spear-throwing game. He got him aside and whispered something to him, and then, acting very carefree and aimless, the two brothers wandered off. They took a long way around in case the others became curious and tried to follow them.

Cat Follower, of the triplets, was the one who tried hardest to be like their older brother Tecumseh. He was brave and honest. But unlike Tecumseh, he was not especially smart, and Loud Noise often had been able to fool him for useful purposes.

Now Loud Noise told Cat Follower that he had found a honey
tree and that he needed help to get the honey because there was so much of it. It would be their secret, and they could have it all to divide between themselves. “I,” said Loud Noise, “cannot climb as well as you. I am not fast or strong like you. But I have learned to cast a spell over bees so they will not sting. If you will climb to the bee hole, I will put a spell on the bees, and you can gather their honey.”

Cat Follower was not a simpleton. He looked warily at Loud Noise and said, “I remember how you made a spell to keep the poison vine from hurting you, and then wiped your bottom with it.”

“I am older now and better at spells, and this of the bees I am very good at doing. Of course I know that you are not afraid of beestings anyway, and you are brave and do not cry. Think of having half of all the honey from a tree! It will be far more honey than you have ever had to eat! But only I know where it is.”

Finally, by his flattering appeals and his irresistible descriptions of honey, descriptions that made his own mouth water so that he could hardly talk, Loud Noise persuaded Cat Follower. They went to Star Watcher’s house. She was out. They got a kettle with a handle. Then they went to the tree and looked at it and planned their attack. Loud Noise made up some of his nonsensical words to chant and make the spell. Cat Follower stood, holding his
pa-waw-ka
in his hand, hardening his courage. Loud Noise himself had never even tried to earn one, and now he hoped that Cat Follower’s token would help him.

Finally Cat Follower felt ready, and he picked up the kettle and climbed up and stood on the big branch. The bees were in a fury over his presence. Taking a deep breath, he thrust his hand into the hole. He found the big combs before his whole hand and arm became numb from stings. He gouged honey out and dumped it in the kettle. The spell was not working at all, but Cat Follower had started this and mere pain was not going to stop him; it would not have stopped his brother Tecumseh.

Bees were drumming around him and stinging his entire body, and in particular his face. Everything blurred as his eyes watered and swelled shut. He could not see Loud Noise, who had hidden himself at a safe distance, but when at last the kettle was full he yelled for him to come and catch it. This was the scary part for Loud Noise, but he lumbered to the base of the tree, caught the kettle, and raced away into hiding. He had not, of course, told Cat Follower that he would go and hide. He wanted some time to eat honey before he had to share it with his brother. Loud
Noise exulted. Not one bee had touched him! There were a few in the kettle, but they were bogged down and helpless in honey.

Cat Follower, blind, gritting his teeth but still not crying out, was too full of aching fire from his stings to climb down, so he just jumped recklessly from the limb to the ground, fell, got up, and crashed through the woods in the direction of the creek. He plunged in, stayed under until most of the bees were gone, and then crawled out. Shaking and gasping, he caked himself with soothing mud, and then, unable to see, he groped around, calling for Loud Noise.

In his hiding place, Loud Noise gorged himself on honey. By the time he had had so much of it that he was sick and could eat no more, there was no more left anyway. He lay gasping and sweating and retching in his covert for several hours. He was afraid he was going to die. And he was afraid that if he did not die from this sickness, Cat Follower would kill him for having eaten all the honey.

Loud Noise would not have had to worry about what his brother would do to him.

Cat Follower’s body, mud-covered and swollen with stings, his face as big and hard as a pumpkin, had been found in the woods a hundred paces from the creek. His death brought a deep grief to the family. Loud Noise, not wanting to make things worse, decided to tell nothing.

L
ATE IN THE FALL OF THAT YEAR
, S
IMON
G
IRTY BROUGHT
to the Shawnees some news from far away. It was hard for Black Hoof and his people to conceive of what it meant, but their imaginations dwelt on it for a while, and after much thought Black Hoof concluded that the news would probably have a greater effect upon the fate of his people than it had seemed at first hearing.

Girty told the people in council: “The American soldier chief named Washington won a great battle at a place called Yorktown by the Great Sea, and the British chief in the east surrendered his whole army to Washington.”

“Does this mean that the war between our father the king of England and the Long Knives is over?” Black Hoof asked.

“That I do not know. There is no peace treaty yet that I hear of,” replied Girty.

“But if there comes a peace treaty, many of the whites who have been busy in the east fighting the king’s soldiers will not be busy at that anymore. Washington’s soldiers will be rewarded
with land for their service in the army. What land do you think that would be?”

Black Hoof drew a long breath. His eyes glittered with anger, then he exhaled and looked very tired. He said in a low voice, “Since Clark threw down the British here, the land of the tribes has been filling with Long Knives. If the British give up the war, I am afraid, and I am sure, the Long Knives will claim all the Middle Ground in their boldness.” His eyes were bright with anger again. “Therefore,” he said, “war against the Long Knives is not over for us. It is just starting.”

I
N THE SPRING OF THE NEXT YEAR A MESSENGER CAME FROM
the Delawares, with a tale so horrible that he fell dumb several times before he could finish telling it.

It had happened on the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum, two days’ hard ride to the east, where a small band of Delawares, sometimes known as the Jesus Indians, lived near the missions of the Moravians. These were people who had accepted the white man’s God, forsworn all violence, and raised crops. Most tribes considered them to be harmless dupes and their chief, Abraham, formerly Netawatwis, a soft-headed fool.

A few days ago, the messenger related, a company of Pennsylvania militia had gone to the mission town of Gnadenhutten and, pretending friendship, disarmed the Jesus Indians and tied them up in the mission. Then they had lined them all up facing the walls, a hundred men, women, and children, and, while they prayed to Jesus for mercy, one by one had smashed their heads with a mallet. Then the soldiers had burned the mission down over the corpses. Two boys had escaped to tell of it.

The Shawnees were stunned, then enraged, From that moment on, the red man’s war against the white man would be a holy war, to rid the land of a people who were too evil to exist. In Pennsylvania the great Mohawk chief Brant was gathering a large force of warriors to punish the Pennsylvanians. The Shawnees, too, must join with Brant. “We will,” Black Hoof vowed.

A
S
C
HIKSIKA AND
T
ECUMSEH RODE THEIR HORSES INTO THE
shallow water of the Licking River at its fording place, Chiksika said: