Panther in the Sky (42 page)

Suddenly the wolf danced forward and nipped her black nose. She shook her massive head and snorted at him, and he moved back, as if going away. But instead of leaving her, he went around behind her, darted in, and bit her right on the anus. Bellowing, the cow rose with a heave of her mighty shoulders and spun around to charge at the wolf, her head down. It was easy for a bison to kill a wolf with horns or hooves—if it could catch one. But the wolf, still grinning, trotted away insouciantly, looking back over his shoulder at the angry cow. As he drew her away from the herd, other wolves from around the perimeter suddenly were coming to take advantage of whatever the situation might offer.

In a moment the cow was surrounded by four wolves, and she realized it. With her head down she turned and trotted back toward the herd. Two bulls nearby had noticed what was happening and began trotting out to escort her in. The wolf followed her for a moment, then sprang forward and snapped again at her rump. Her back hooves lashed out in a mighty kick, but the wolf was ready and quick and dodged the kick. Then, still grinning and seeming to shrug, he left her and trotted on around the edge of the herd, looking for another opportunity. The other three
wolves had turned and gone off in another direction. Chiksika laughed, and Tecumseh smiled with pleasure and amusement.

Chiksika said, “You see, as I have told you, they are like us. This is the way we do with a Long Knife army. It is too big for us to kill it. But we can nip it on its edges. We can make some of the soldiers come out to chase us, then we catch them. If too many come, we must grin and shrug like that wolf, and go back, and wait for another chance. We can make it nervous and keep it from sleeping, and make it shoot its guns in the dark. When soldiers are nervous and tired like that, they make mistakes. And that is when we get them. It is like the first time their army came to Chillicothe. I was away, but you remember it.”

“Yes! When only twenty-four of our warriors followed them toward Kain-tuck-ee and shot a hundred of them.”

“We were like the little wolves then, biting the back end of the big army.”

“Yes!” Tecumseh nodded, delighted with this.

“While we are here, then,” Chiksika said, “study the wolves and see how they do. They have been following and eating the mighty bison since the Beginning, and they have learned things that a Shawnee leader should know. Because the whitefaces are now numerous in this country, big like the bison herds.”

“One thing I have learned already: a single wolf cannot pull down and kill a bison. But together they can pull one down. Listen, brother. If the tribes were like the wolves and banded together, they could do more against the whites. Like Pontiac. If the tribes thought together like the wolf pack, the chiefs would never go to the white men’s treaty councils and give them the lands we live on.”

Chiksika gazed at the bison on the prairie and thought about Tecumseh’s words. He said, “Each nation is like a wolf pack. But the nations have fought each other since the time before memory. Now and then they ally with each other for a while. But they never forget the old angers for long. Remember the Grasshopper War. It was a thing that truly happened long ago, but it is a legend to teach us a sad thing about ourselves. Two enemy tribes that had made peace lived in nearby towns. Their children were learning to play together. In a meadow, two children had a dispute over which had caught a grasshopper. They fought. Their mothers came running from both towns. They struck each other’s children, then each other. The men came running. Before it was quiet again, many, many had been killed. You see, the tribes are too
proud and jealous. Even a grasshopper can be used to break alliances.”

“Though that has been so,” Tecumseh said, “the nations will have to believe together, or the whitefaces can divide us and do as they please with us.”

They went back toward the creek valley where the rest of their hunters were encamped. This limitless prairie made Tecumseh’s heart swell with hope and a sense of well-being, for the first time since the Long Knife raids and the death of Moluntha. The sunny-gold grass waved in the warm wind from the west, and the ground under his feet was soft and springy. It was as if the prairie ground were the flesh of the Mother, Earth. There were no rocks or roots in the way of one’s feet. There were no trees shadowing the land, except in the creek and river valleys. The sky was vast, piled heaven high with white-gold clouds over the northern horizon, clearest blue everywhere else. The shrilling of insects in the grass seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other. One felt high on this land; to south and west it sloped and rolled down and away to the broad valley where the Ohio-se-pe and the Missi-se-pe flowed together.

And it was a paradise for the hunter. Nearby were the great herds of bison, food and warm hides in seemingly inexhaustible quantity, visible from miles away as masses of black on the dun prairie, easy to follow and find because of their predictable habits of roaming and feeding and the trampled roads of their migrations. And the prairie land was abundant with lesser foods. Deer and rabbit were everywhere, bear and turkey were in the bottomlands, the backwaters and brushy islands and sandbars were so alive with waterfowl that from a distance sometimes they seemed to shift and tremble. And fish of every kind, up to the great whiskered catfish that would feed a whole family, could be pulled from the waters. There were huge, delicious turtles on the land and in the rivers. In some tributaries, mussels were harvested in such quantities that the houses of the mussel eaters were built upon hills of shells.

It was a paradise for the hunter. But, Chiksika would say, “The Shawnee lands in O-hi-o and Kain-tuck-ee used to be like this. There was more game than we could kill. Now the whitefaces are there, and the hunting is hard. You look at all the bison here and you say, These would last forever. The Sioux and Sauk and Arikara say the herds beyond the Missi-se-pe are so great sometimes that you cannot see to the other side, and you think, These
could never be all gone. But, my brother, we used to think that of the animals in Kain-tuck-ee. Until the whitefaces came.”

F
OR MANY MOONS
C
HIKSIKA AND
T
ECUMSEH HAD BEEN WANDERING
. Since the last destruction of the Shawnee towns in O-hi-o, they had been nomads, hunters, occasionally marauders. In their hearts they longed for the beautiful towns where they had been children, but the towns were not towns anymore. Time after time they had been turned to ash heaps, upon which the patient old Black Hoof and the People again and again tried to make towns. It was too saddening to see the hundreds of charred places that had been houses, to see the little camps of married men with their women and children trying with half-broken spirits to make their country what it had been.

Tecumseh and Chiksika, like many of the unmarried young men, had begun to drift away to other places, places farther from the white man’s advance. They had stayed at Miami towns and Kickapoo towns north and west of their old homeland. They had visited among the Potawatomies. Chiksika had taken Tecumseh on long, long rides, to hunt, to raid white men’s boats, but mostly just to see the few parts of the country where the red men could still live and hunt and range without having to be on guard against whitefaces. They had stayed in villages built in marshy river bottoms and on windy prairies. They had been the guests of the Miamis at Kekionga, of Kickapoos on the Mississinewa, of Weas on the Wabash-se-pe. They had become friends with young warriors of those nations and of the Sauk and Fox and Ottawa. They had talked and eaten with these young men beside a hundred campfires and had learned many of their words.

They had lived a while with young women of some of those tribes, without marriage. Tecumseh’s appetite for women was powerful. These living-ins were not something they would have done in their own nation, which was still more rigid about that matter. Too, the girls of the tribes who would take up with visiting men like that were sometimes girls who had lain with traders or other white men, and there was a danger of getting diseases in the loins. Sometimes Tecumseh would lie awake in the darkness with a musky, warm girl beside him, and, though he would be full of languor and affection, there would be a whisper in his soul, an unhappy whisper, telling him he was taking too lightly something that the teachings said was sacred. Once he had risen from beside a sleeping Miami girl and slipped away from her hut to go and stay by himself beside a small brook and pray for better
direction of his life, that direction which had been hinted at so often by the visions, by the Spirit Helper, by his dreams, by the sign of the green Eye of the Panther in the sky. Surely all those signs did not mean for him to expend all his strength in body pleasure.

Thus the brothers had wandered for many moons, these brother warriors who admired each other so deeply. Big Fish had usually traveled with them, and sometimes Thick Water would find them as they passed near home and would join them. They had wandered north to the marshes and the white dunes that bordered the great lake called Mis-e-ken, and there they had walked along the sands with the roar of the surf and the stinging, sand-laden wind blowing away their words as they talked. There Tecumseh had seen tiny cliff swallows darting out of little nesting holes in the steep sand banks, nests right in the path of the strong wind of the lake, and in his wonderment at the immense space of the world, his heart had so swelled with the love of Weshemoneto that he had wept in the wind. And then later that day from the top of a high dune they had looked out and seen on the very horizon of the lake, stark against the gray clouds and gray water, a speck of white. It had puzzled him until Chiksika had realized what it was: the white cloth wings of one of the huge boats of the British. Chiksika had seen one of those once in the mouth of the Maumee-se-pe. “Soon,” he said, “we will not be able to look anywhere over land or water without seeing white men.”

“Or even sky,” Tecumseh said.

Wherever they had wandered, Tecumseh had been able to feel within himself something pointing toward the unsteady place in the center of the earth. When he had walked in the old Shawnee homeland, he had felt that it was far to the southwest. As he walked on the shore of the great lake called Mis-e-ken, he had felt that it was almost straight south but still far away. Now he was close to the place where the Beautiful River and the Missi-se-pe flowed together, and when he walked on this ground he felt that he was almost on top of the center of the trembling earth, as if the heart of the Great Turtle beat deep below his feet. It was not that the earth was trembling; he had not felt that since he’d arrived here. But as he stood overlooking the confluence of the two great rivers, he knew this was the center, as he had always known he would know it when he stood upon it. Now he stopped Chiksika and said to him, “Brother, here is the place I have spoken of. Down deep in the earth, down that way in the Missi-se-pe as if it were far under the water of the river, there is where
it is. The place I have felt, the place of which I talked with Eagle Speaker, the Bear Walker.” He said this very calmly. Chiksika looked at him with a fearful face. “It shakes now under your feet?”

“No. But this is the place. The message will come from the earth here.” He made a circular gesture, indicating the valley before them.

Chiksika searched Tecumseh’s face and seemed to see something in his eyes. “Do you learn what the message says?”

“No. It does not come yet.… Look!”

He pointed, down across the huge confluence of waters where the two different colors of greenish yellow and yellow-brown were forever mixing. A white bird had just fluttered over their heads and flown down toward the south. Tecumseh could hear a voice as it flew, but not words. Soon the bird was too small to see. Beyond the place where it had vanished, a wisp of smoke rose over the faraway trees on the western shore of the Missi-se-pe. Down there was a town the Spaniards had built, with fortifications. Even the Spaniards, who claimed the lands on that side of the Missi-se-pe, were wary of the encroachments of the Long Knives.

Tecumseh now stood watching the wisp of smoke for a few minutes, trying to understand what the dove meant. It was like the time it first came to him in his vision: unsaid. Chiksika stood still, waiting for him to explain something. Finally, pointing west, Tecumseh said: “In that way lies the place where our mother went, with our sept and the Thawegilas?”

“That way. Yes. That is the way we will go to see her.”

“She is not over there anymore,” said Tecumseh.

“Ai! What do you say?”

“She is not that way. She is that way.”

The wind was blowing his hair and clothes. He swung his arm then and pointed the way the bird had gone. Far down that way lay the homeland of the Creeks, her people. This perplexed Chiksika. After the buffalo hunting, he and Tecumseh and some fellow hunters from the little Shawnee town at the mouth of the Wabash-se-pe had intended to go across the Missi-se-pe to the place where the Spaniards had given the Shawnees land to live in. Chiksika and Tecumseh had planned to find their mother there and stay for a while with her. After a long time Tecumseh said, “I think she has left the People and has gone to where she was born. It seems to me that it will be a long time before we see her again.”