Panther in the Sky (43 page)

T
HAT EVENING AT DUSK THE BROTHERS SAT WITH THE HUNTERS
by their campfire and talked about the buffalo. They would ride toward the herd tomorrow and drive them down the bluffs close to the Beautiful River, and there they would kill enough of them for the use of the hunters’ town. Women from the town had already come down in canoes from the Wabash-se-pe and had made a camp below the bluffs, where they would butcher the kill, jerk some of the flesh, and clean the hides. By doing this so close to the river, they could then take the hides and meat back up to their town easily in the canoes, much more than could be taken overland. It was all planned.

Now at dusk the wolves began singing. Each voice joined the song in just a slightly different key so that no two were singing quite the same, but their voices were so blended that they sounded like one wolf with many throats. It was a far, haunting song and made Tecumseh’s heart ache with a nameless yearning, a yearning to understand the tomorrows. That night he went to sleep thinking of the unseen power of this place.

T
HE GROUND RUMBLED WITH HOOFBEATS AND BLURRED
backward with the speed of his horse. Alongside him ran the herd: a lunging, pounding mass of coarse, shaggy, dusty, blackish-brown hair, dark horns, tiny eyes. Ahead of Tecumseh and behind him, on the fringes of the herd, rode the other hunters, whooping and yipping in a frenzy, secured to their horses’ backs by the grip of their sinewy legs. Every hunter was selecting the bison that he wanted to kill first. Some of the hunters were holding rifles, but some, like Tecumseh, had chosen to use the bow. To be able to draw a strong enough bow to drive an arrow into the deep chest of a bull bison and pierce its heart, while clinging to one’s horse in a full gallop, was a supreme test of a man’s strength and skill and courage, and a bow kill was counted as more commendable. Tecumseh had never killed a bison with an arrow before but was sure he would not fail. The hunters from the Wabash-se-pe town were accustomed to such hunting on the prairie and were masterful horsemen, and they liked to show off for their forest brethren when they came. But it was not in Tecumseh’s nature to let himself be outdone, so now he rode with furious speed, guiding his powerful mount with knee pressure and clinging like a burr to its back, riding as close to the thundering tide of beasts as any of the prairie Shawnees were doing. He had already left Chiksika far behind and was chasing the leader of
the herd, a huge bull the rest of the herd was following in its panicky stampede.

The dangers were terribly plain. If a horse fell, it and its rider would instantly be borne down by the awful momentum of the big animals and crushed and chopped to pulp by falling bodies and sharp hooves.

Tecumseh was now ahead of all the other hunters. He yodeled with joy and dug his heels into his horse’s flank. The ground was sloping downward here, as the herd tore into the broad valley toward the mouth of the O-hi-o-se-pe. The bison were letting themselves be driven just the way the hunters intended. These men had hunted them here for many years, and such drives seldom failed to turn out just as they were meant to.

His heart high with thrill, Tecumseh now heard a gunshot behind him, then another. Hunters back there were shooting into the herd. Now, the speed of the stampede increasing as it tore down the slope, Tecumseh began his move to cut out the lead bull. He swung leftward, moving across the front of the oncoming herd, riding headlong, hair flying. In a moment he was within five yards of the bull, and he took an arrow from his quiver and nocked it. The bull’s massive, surging shoulder, flecked with his foamy drool, drew nearer as the distance was closed by the efforts of the fine horse. The bull’s hooves threw up bits of turf even though it now looked as if he were hardly skimming the ground. Tecumseh’s heart was big with admiration for the bull. The grass flowed backward, a yellow blur in the narrowing space between predator and prey.

Tecumseh knew that in this desperate last minute he would have to cut the bull aside out of the path of the herd before he shot it, or it would be trampled to carrion. So now he cut in behind the bull, to get on its left side. This was the most dangerous instant. If anything went wrong, he would be down in the path of a thousand hooves. He was aware that this was a greater recklessness than anything he had ever done. It was not necessary to put oneself in quite so much jeopardy to kill a bull bison. But he had selected this chief bull, and he wanted to take it right off the point of the herd, because to do so was excellence, and he was Tecumseh, the Panther-Crossing-the-Sky, and excellence was expected of him—not just by the People, but by Weshemoneto. This he had been growing to understand since his first bravery in battle, and now, here in this place over the Center, where the signs and dreams had been haunting him so strongly, here he had to show excellence.

The bull was aware that his pursuer was now on his left hind-quarter instead of his right, so he veered to the right to try to elude him. Tecumseh urged the horse and drew alongside to force him clear out of the line of stampede. The rest of the herd, pressed together in its mass, would not be able to turn this abruptly. Tecumseh glanced back and saw their crazed eyes and flashing hooves and foam-specked forequarters. A little farther and he would have the bull cut out of their downhill path, and he could release his arrow.

But something happened.

Something in the tension of the speeding pursuit snapped, and Tecumseh felt the pony lurch and drop beneath him, felt himself pitching forward toward the blur of yellow-tan grass, saw the blue sky tilt before his eyes and the black wall of bison and then the blue sky again, and then he was on the ground and his left thigh snapped under the weight of his falling horse and there was a lightning flash of pain and an immense black thunder was over him and the ground was shaking. His horse was thrashing and twitching and jolting, shrieking in pain. Many things were striking Tecumseh, striking him hard, making lightning flashes in his head. The herd was running over him. He was in the dusty grass, and the earth was shaking and jolting. He heard a thousand familiar voices at once and yet recognized every one of them in the same instant. In his mind he saw villages falling to the ground and dust and smoke billowing up. He saw a great boat standing in water, piled with great white wings of cloth above it, and men among those wings, tiny men like birds in trees. He saw a stout man in a turban, with a mustache and one eye, and the man was familiar, and his name, Tecumseh somehow knew, was Tenskwatawa, He-Opens-the-Door. He also saw a white man with intense eyes and a small mouth and saw hundreds of huge-headed horsemen riding toward him, silhouetted in such brilliant yellow dust that they were like a herd of dark bison. The pain of his broken leg was all through him. He held the
pa-waw-ka
stone in his hand next to his heart and felt the jolts of the earth coming up from far below. In the thundering noise now he heard the deep voice of a chief he had never heard before and saw his broad, stolid face, a face with faded spots on the skin. Then the dove flew over, and then four wolves went by with the moon in their eyes. He saw himself as a boy standing at the place where he had been born, the spring near Piqua, and trees were falling around him and the spring water was flowing backward, and the bowels of the earth were rumbling and sending up jolts that jarred his
teeth together. Only after the rumbling was gone did he see an enormous panther crouched on the horizon. Two rays shone out of its green eye.

T
ECUMSEH WAS ON THE GROUND BY THE GREAT RIVER. THE
sun was going down over the river. A woman—he thought it was Star Watcher, her back to the sunset and her face in shadow—was kneeling over him. Chiksika’s voice said something nearby, and the woman’s reply was not in Star Watcher’s voice. This was one of the women from the hunters’ town near the mouth of the Wabash-se-pe. Tecumseh smelled woodsmoke and blood and heard many people talking and fires crackling. He looked aside and saw the people butchering bison all around. Horses grazed, hobbled, on the slope. There was one great, fiery pain throbbing up from his broken thigh. It hurt more and more; the bone ends were moving; somebody was pulling his foot and making the broken bone grind and grate on itself within the meat of his thigh, and it was as if he himself were being butchered, being taken apart like all the bison lying around. Hundreds of flies were droning and buzzing. Tecumseh groaned and quaked; he tightened his throat to keep from crying out.

It was Chiksika who was pulling his foot. The woman had her hands around Tecumseh’s thigh and was feeling it and looking at it very intently. She said:

“There.” Then she wound some strouding cloth snug around his leg. She picked up a large piece of elm bark that had been freshly peeled off a trunk just as big around as Tecumseh’s thigh. She pried it open and set it around his thigh and let it close to its natural shape. Then with strips of hide she began tying it shut, binding the bark firmly so that it held his leg stiff and straight. Now Chiksika had moved up and was kneeling by Tecumseh’s shoulder, and the sunset glow was bright red on his face. Chiksika said:

“Weshemoneto protects you. The herd trampled your horse to nothing, but you are only cut up, and this leg broken.”

Tecumseh released a quaking sigh. In the firm sheath of the bark splint, the pain in his thigh was receding a little, and he could think and remember. “Brother,” he said, “tell me: did anyone else feel the ground shake?”

Chiksika looked at him strangely. “The ground shakes under the tread of so many bison, and they ran over you.”

“Then,” said Tecumseh as if to himself, “no one else felt the
ground shake. I have seen more signs, brother. I do not know what they mean.”

Chiksika was quiet for a while, a far-seeing look in his eyes as he held Tecumseh’s hand and looked toward the sunset. Finally he said, “You had a sign yesterday that you would not go to see our mother. Now that is so.” He looked down at Tecumseh’s splinted leg and said, “You will not be able to travel on with me.

“Then,” Tecumseh replied, “if you find her, tell her I will be along someday.” He turned his head and faced the sunset. The red ball of the sun was beyond the heat and smoke of a bonfire, and its image trembled in the heatwaves. Tecumseh looked at the red sun and held his
pa-waw-ka
stone in his hand. He thanked Weshemoneto for sparing his life and for giving him so many important signs.

Then he asked Weshemoneto to tell him, at the proper time, the meaning of the signs.

I
T WAS EARLY MORNING
. A
DELICATE MIST WAS RISING OFF
the creek, tinged with the first rays of the sun. A heron stalked along in the water’s edge on its stick legs, looking for something to catch. In the grain fields off to the south, songbirds were starting to trill.

Loud Noise lay on his belly on a robe near the door of his hut with his chin on the back of his hand and watched the path to the creek. His gullet burned with rum.

Loud Noise had built his hut here, in a boggy bottomland, away from the rest of the town, for one reason. It gave a close view of a quiet green pool of the creek banked with flat, mossy slabs of stone, a little above its confluence with the river. The floor of his hut was usually spongy and damp, sometimes even muddy, and everything in the hut was mildewed and muddy. It was a
place of mosquitoes and snakes. The hut itself was so carelessly made and shabby that it could have been taken for a beaver house. Star Watcher, a very good house builder, might have helped him build a neat, snug house, even though she had children to take care of, if he had chosen a more reasonable site. She suspected why he had chosen this place, and she called him a twisted-head. And so he had put the rickety, drafty hovel up mostly by himself, as he had no woman of his own to build it for him.

He had no woman of his own, and that was his problem. Loud Noise was a young man now, and he had the appetites of three or four men—in his loins and in his guts. But he was as ugly as three or four men put together. Women and girls laughed behind their hands at him and drew away when his one bulging, evil-looking eye stared at them.

Loud Noise was always conscious of the ugliness of his empty right eyesocket and tended to keep the left side of his face forward and the disfigured eye as obscure as possible, so habitually that his head appeared to be on crooked, and his right shoulder was always aching and hunched. With the prominent left eye he stared at women in rude hunger. Their aloofness angered him, and he hated them even as he desired them.

Girls grew silly and squirmy when his brother Tecumseh was around. Even Stands-Between, ordinary and undistinguished as he was, could cause some girls to lower their eyes and look coy. But Loud Noise, with his great passions and his feeling that he possessed undetected powers and unappreciated wisdom, only repelled them. He was desperately lonely, and angry. Most of the town’s people were uncomfortable with his presence, his squinting eye, and his curious outbursts of gibberish and laughter, with his dirtiness and gassiness, so it was fine with them if he chose to burrow alone in the distant bog. People were afraid to offend him directly, because he seemed the kind of person who might retaliate with witchcraft. In his hut he sat up late at night, drank trader’s liquor, sang to himself, gorged on food, and grew paunchy. On still nights he could be heard practicing loud belches and windblasts and whooping with drunken hilarity at his more remarkable noises. Unlike most drunkards, he did not wander the town wailing or starting trouble, but entertained himself all night or sometimes tormented himself all night with his strange mind, and slept till midday most days. Hunters seldom took him along because he floundered through the woods and scared away the game. For the great quantities of food he ate, he depended mostly upon his generous sister Star Watcher and her husband. When
he did have to depend upon himself, he caught fish, helped himself from gardens or from the tribal corn fields, or sometimes he would trade a drink of liquor for a small hunk of venison or half a turkey from a homecoming hunter. He could eat and digest anything, including unripe corn and vegetables and half-spoiled meat. It was easy enough to get by in a tribe that never let its people starve.