Panther in the Sky (46 page)

“When Chiksika came to see me after you were hurt, he spoke of these things you see. I have thought much about them. I do
not know, either. The passing of the four wolves means the time of four moons. But from when to when? Not from the time you dreamed them, because more than that has passed. I do not know. You will know when more signs come. You will see things happen that were in the dream, and a little at a time, maybe all at once, you will come to understand. But to understand …”

“To understand the signs in time, I must please Weshemoneto and be worthy.”

“Yes.”

“I know that there will never be any peace for me, as there was none for Chiksika. As long as there are white men in this land I cannot rest. The People and our allies have killed twenty hundreds of whites at least, but a hundred times that many now live where not one lived when I was the age of that boy over there.” He pointed at a child who squatted under a live oak. “It would do the People no good to give up and withdraw across the Great River. Though the Spaniards have that land now, they will not be able to stand there when the Long Knives want to cross over for more land. I have heard that a rider can go twenty days and see no one on the plains of the western ground. That sounds like an empty land. But when the whites have filled up Kain-tuck-ee and O-hi-o and all places on this side of the Missi-se-pe, then they will cross over, and they will fill up that great emptiness as fast as one of Loud Noise’s hot stinks fills up a cold house.”

She squeezed his wrists and even allowed a fond little smile to pass over the sadness of her face.

He went on: “Is there a way to stop them? No one I hear knows a way. Sometimes I feel that all the signs I have seen are for the purpose of telling me a way.”

She nodded. “When there is a terrible need, Weshemoneto sends the People a great man. I know and many of us know that you came through me to be that man.” She was rubbing his wrists again and was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “And you know that when Weshemoneto sends a great leader, he sends also a great medicine man to help him. And you know this: the strongest medicine is often found in what is most contrary.”

“I have seen in the dreams,” Tecumseh said, “a man I believe to be Loud Noise in maturity. And what is there more contrary than he is? Yes! The Great Good Spirit requires something from everyone. Even our poor Loud Noise was marked by a sign.”

S
TAR
W
ATCHER’S WORLD WAS IN A TURMOIL, HER HUSBAND
was very badly wounded, and she was doing some of the hardest and most unpleasant kinds of work a woman had to do, but in spite of all that she could not keep down a silent song of joy that kept bubbling up in her soul.

Half of this town was a ruin of charred poles and heaps of ashes. Kekionga Town and most of the other villages near the head of the Maumee-se-pe had been torched once again by a Long Knife army. From where she stood working, she could see the blackened timbers of the old French trading store. But everywhere among the ashes, new
wigewas
were rising. She herself had just yesterday completed a bark hut big enough for her family; Stands Firm lay on the bed inside it, half-conscious, bound up with poultices, shot through a lung and bayoneted through the face by the Long Knife soldiers. But Stands Firm was a very strong man, and he was making his way back from the edge of death. Every day the seepage from his chest was less bloody, and his cheek was healing. There would be a jagged scar, and the bayonet had also ripped open the elegant loop of his perforated earlobe, leaving a long strand of soft flesh dangling. But he was alive, and he had lived up to his name in the great battle, as one of Little Turtle’s subchiefs. The allied tribes had fought savagely on their homeland and had inflicted such severe casualties on the American army that it had turned and fled back to the O-hi-o. The warriors had killed a dozen officers and nearly a hundred soldiers, most of them the Blue-Coat regulars who were supposed to be the bravest soldiers of the Long Knife army, the same kinds of soldiers who had thrown down the British king’s Redcoats. Little Turtle’s great heart and mind were being celebrated now; he was the chief who had routed the army of the United States. Stands Firm, who had been in charge of a group of Shawnee warriors
defending the town, had driven the Blue-Coats back across the river and pursued them along the riverbank in a long, bloody, running battle until the ball through his chest had stopped him. Black Hoof and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees, and Breaker-in-Pieces of the Delawares, and the white allies, the Girtys, had added more to the legends of their names, and for now, at least, it seemed unlikely that the army would ever again be so rash as to try to march into the country again.

But the song in Star Watcher’s soul was not the result of that victorious defense: she never rejoiced in the killing of men.

For days she had felt growing inside her a certainty that her brother Tecumseh was coming near, returning after his long absence in the south. It was an instinctive sureness that grew as the hazardous years went by, like the unsaid knowings that animals have. In her heart and dreams she seemed to know when he was going farther or coming closer. And sometimes there would be the hard sudden pulse and want of air, when she felt that he was in extreme danger. Only a few days ago she had felt that, even though he was now not far from home; through a part of a night she had been sleepless and anxious, but finally it had passed.

At this moment Star Watcher was working a new deerhide over the end of a post, twisting it and pulling it and rubbing it, to make it soft and supple. She gripped it with both hands and pulled this way and that with all the strength of her shoulders and back and arms. She would do this for hours, until her hands were so cramped she could hardly open them. It was hard work, but she maintained a kind of rhythm, and her mind drifted with the rhythm and was calm and full of hope. Now and then she would stop and wipe her hands and go in to look at her husband, help him drink water, feed him a little. Her daughter, now six, was playing with a corn-husk doll, the only toy she had managed to hang on to in the flight from the Long Knife army. Her son was out in the town playing with a pack of little ones. It was a cool day, but not raw as the days of this moon usually were, a good day for working outside.

She thought of Tecumseh and of all the things that had happened to him in the south. The stories had come home, season by season, told by warriors of his band who came and went. Star Watcher had long known of Chiksika’s foretold death and of Tecumseh’s journey to find their mother. And in the year since, there had come story after story of his astounding deeds in the Ten-ness-ee country, in the lands of the Cherokee and Alabamu peoples. In the time since Chiksika’s death, Tecumseh had fought
the Long Knives as if all of Chiksika’s prowess and courage and cunning had passed into his own soul. He had ambushed supply trains and militia patrols everywhere from the mountains to the Missi-se-pe, often attacking even though outnumbered. The warriors who served with him came home full of glory, for he gave them opportunities to do more than they had suspected they could do. They brought home scalplocks and wonderful stories of miraculous triumphs. A young Creek named Seekabo came and told stories that made it seem that Tecumseh could see in the dark, hear through mountains, and deflect bullets; his tales had so stirred Thick Water that he had returned to the south with Seekabo to rejoin his old boyhood comrade. And one of the things these messengers always said that pleased Star Watcher was that Tecumseh never hurt a prisoner. He never killed women or children. Tecumseh might have assumed many of Chiksika’s traits, but not his cold vein of cruelty. Even at this distance, and through years of absence, she was still the Watcher of the Shooting Star.

Then she heard the voice behind her:
“Meh Ah’ shemah,
my sister.”

Star Watcher shut her eyes for a moment. A smile shaped her lips, and her heart felt as if it were being squeezed, then released. She dropped the deerhide, straightened her tired back, then turned to look at him.

“Meh Ah’ thetha,
my brother! I knew you would be here soon!”

The faces around him were a blur; she did not even see who they were. His eyes were, as always, looking in a way that perceived not only the sight but the spirit of their object, eyes that seemed to pull everything into themselves. He was so lean, so tight-skinned, that every bone and muscle in his face and neck was distinct. When she embraced him, he was hard as oak, but as always he gave off great warmth. For a long while they held each other, faces radiant, feeling the long-divided oneness between them closing, becoming again that one dual being: Star and Star Watcher. And finally she drew back, holding his wrists—he remembered how his mother had held his wrists just that way—and she told him, “You must come in and see my husband. The Long Knives almost killed him; to see you will bring him up a long way.”

And so it did.

Later Stands-Between and Loud Noise came hurrying. They were of warrior age now. Stands-Between had fought in that long battle by the river. He could not raise his left arm very far; a sword cut was healing along his ribs. “Here is the man who cut
me with his long knife,” he said, holding up a yellow-haired scalplock and smiling.

But when Loud Noise emerged from the crowd, Tecumseh was shocked. It was the puffy-eyed face of a flabby drunkard, fat-cheeked, slack-lipped, a smile more like a sneer. And he stank like a French trapper. Seeing the revulsion in Tecumseh’s eyes, Loud Noise suddenly was ashamed and almost afraid. But Tecumseh said, “Brother, I have thought of you very much. They say you did not serve in the battle.”

“I am learning to be a shaman,” Loud Noise muttered.

“I think that you will need much attention from me.”

T
HE NEXT DAY THE STORYTELLING BEGAN, BETWEEN THOSE
who had been fighting in the south and those who had made such a victory here. Old Black Hoof looked at Tecumseh and remembered that this was a boy who had run from his first battle. But he was here with a band of young men who had taken almost as many scalps as the united tribes had taken from the soldiers after the battle. Black Hoof’s adopted son Big Fish proudly told most of the stories about what Tecumseh’s band had done. The listeners were spellbound throughout, but especially when he told of a miracle Tecumseh had made only a few nights ago, after crossing into O-hi-o. Surrounded in their camp one midnight by about twenty-five white men under command of the great-voiced But-lah, they had escaped when Tecumseh threw his blanket over the campfire and created darkness. Then Tecumseh had rallied his eight to attack the confused white men in the dark, killing twelve of them and chasing the rest away.

Tecumseh had a curious reluctance to boast and soon told Black Hoof that he felt foolish for fighting little bands of whites south of Kain-tuck-ee and missing the nation’s greatest victory. “I should have been here instead,” he said, and laughed.

Black Hoof told of the cautious and fearful way the American general had conducted his forces, never making bold moves, never once firing the cannons he had dragged all the way up from the Beautiful River. The general’s name was Harmar, and he had been an officer in the big war against the British. But he had not known how to fight warriors in the woods.

“I am happy that it was not the old Long Knife General Clark, then,” Tecumseh said. “They would have been wiser to have Clark!”

“Perhaps not,” said Black Hoof, his black eyes glittering under his thick, white-frosted eyebrows. “Girty has heard that Clark
is bitter and angry at his government, that he falls drunk in the streets of their town of Louisville where he lives. I think we will never have to fear the name of Clark anymore.”

“Ah.” Tecumseh pondered on this, with both gratitude and sadness. The evil of drink was mighty if it could bring down even a great and strong man. Even an enemy should not be humiliated by it, if he was a great enemy. But maybe it was more than that. Change-of-Feathers, the aged shaman, said:

“When he built his town in that Falling Water place, among the ghosts of the old white giants, he was making his doom.”

“Now,” said Black Hoof, “our nation is joyous and resolute. Surely the white men everywhere are humbled and discouraged even as we rejoice.

“But we have seen that with the white men, even as with ourselves, out of the smoldering ashes of defeat are fanned the flames of vengeance. It is our turn to rejoice, their turn to vow revenge. Before a year is gone, I expect, their father Washington will send another army against us. And surely it will be a bigger army than Harmar’s, and surely with a braver general.”

“Should this prove to be so,” Tecumseh spoke into the thoughtful silence, “then once again we must meet them allied with our brothers from the other nations. Little Turtle, Breaker-in-Pieces, Tarhe the Crane. We must forget old disputes and join together, as you did with the confederation, as we did with our Cherokee brothers. If we are all of one heart, we are all of one people, and however brave their new general is, he will not defeat us. This we must have learned by now.”

“Yes,” Black Hoof said when he had heard all this. “We must work this winter to strengthen our friendships. What Tecumseh says is true.” But Black Hoof’s face looked tired and worried as he said this, and Tecumseh thought: Every time, it grows harder for him. As he grows old, he wants peace and rest. How good peace and rest would be. But I hope I shall never grow so old and tired that I would think of peace while the white men come into our country!

I
T SEEMED THAT
L
OUD
N
OISE TRIED TO AVOID BEING ALONE
with Tecumseh.