Panther in the Sky (49 page)

Tecumseh now began dancing in a curved course toward the Singer, turning and whirling, springing and crouching as he went, and singing of an exploit in his battles against the Long Knives.

He sprang high in the air with a whoop and then danced back in a curving course toward the semicircle of warriors, rattles shivering and chattering, every muscle tense and agleam with sweat even on this cold morning, and the people’s eyes were fastened upon him as he took his place. And then the second warrior leaped high and went forward to sing of another victory.

Never had the people seen more splendid dancing than this, never had they been so stirred by the daring spirit, as they heard these songs. The air around the Stomp Ground was charged as with the coming of a lightning storm, and the people’s hearts were strengthened for the coming of another Long Knife army. In these quick, strong, handsome young men burned the spirit of the Shawnee People, and like the Panther, it would not be caught and killed.

In the edge of the crowd of watchers stood the young Peckuwe woman, She-Is-Favored. She was trembling. Her eyes were upon Tecumseh. She saw nothing else.

Near her in the crowd stood Loud Noise. His eye was upon her, and he saw how she was watching his brother. He sighed in misery.

T
HE WHITE MEN’S ARMY WAS DEEP INTO THE COUNTRY
again, moving like a huge herd, and Tecumseh and his warriors were around them like wolves.

It was late in the year, cold, and the clouds were dark and heavy with snow. The Long Knife war chief St. Clair had sat in his fort on the O-hi-o two moons longer than expected, getting his army ready, and the tribes for once had had time to harvest their crops so the soldiers could not destroy them. This was a good fortune, and a sign that even this new white war chief might be stupid, too, and gave heart to the people. They began to feel strong and were not awfully afraid even as the army came toward them.

Tecumseh had been selected to lead the scouts and the harassing parties, to watch the army and to nip at it and see that it got no rest. He was to observe when the army was least vigilant and when it was on ground most favorable for attack.

This time, as with Harmar’s army the year before, Little Turtle wanted to strike the Long Knives out in the countryside and not let them come and burn the towns, not if he could possibly stop them.

Almost as soon as St. Clair’s army marched out of Cincinnati Town, Tecumseh had observed another clue that this general was perhaps stupid: he did not keep a company of scouts out in advance of his army. It was plain that this was another of those eastern generals who did not know how to move in the red man’s country. Tecumseh and his scouts had no trouble getting close enough to the army to study it in detail, to circle around it like wolves, to catch its stragglers and to disrupt its sleep many times every night.

At once Tecumseh began to notice other weaknesses in this army.

For one, it was not the disciplined army all of Blue-Coat soldiers that the spies had warned it would be. Though perhaps half of it was Blue-Coats who moved in an orderly fashion, the other half was composed of the usual unruly farmer soldiers with their strutting colonels and captains, their slow and noisy and straggly way of marching.

For another, the army seemed to have hardly enough of a supply train to feed it more than a few days. Tecumseh looked at the packhorses, which were laden with tools and boxes and bundles and powder kegs, and he calculated in his head, and it seemed to him that there could not be enough food here to supply such a mass of men very long.

Still another weakness of the army was that it was followed by a great crowd of women, many of them with children and baggage, sorry-looking horses, dogs, tents, trunks, and kettles. Watching them in their evening camps, Tecumseh could discern that many of these followers were the soldiers’ wives and children, while many of the women seemed to belong to no one in particular. Tecumseh knew already that the white men’s armies usually had some camp followers, but this noisy mob of tagalongs was nearly a fourth the size of the army itself, and it was plain that it would cause big problems for the Long Knife general. It either slowed down the army’s pace or fell behind; on most days it did both. The camp followers were miserable in this weather, just as the soldiers were miserable, and Tecumseh at night, prowling near the enemy’s camp, could hear the men and women quarreling and the children whining. It was easy to guess that the war chief St. Clair must dislike having this mob following his army into the Indian country, for not only would he have to feed them from his army’s supplies, he would have to protect them.

And so the Long Knives rumbled and grumbled and bawled into the old Shawnee lands, moving just a few miles a day through the leafless, cold, wet woods, then setting up its squalid, noisy evening camps. Every evening it would build around itself a barricade of dug earth, brush, and deadwood and set out a ring of sentries, which was the only sign Tecumseh could see of any wisdom in this general. During the nights, then, Tecumseh and his party would make noises in the darkness, make birdcalls that deliberately did not sound very much like birdcalls, so that the white sentries would know there were warriors close around them. Sometimes they would creep close to the army’s camp and, like mockingbirds, do enough yelling to sound like hundreds and would shoot their guns and create a panic in this herd of an army, only to vanish suddenly and then repeat the disruption somewhere on another flank. These alarms would take hours to die down, and at once Tecumseh’s men would create more. Sometimes in these disturbances the army sentries would shoot at each other in the dark, and when this happened the warriors would laugh aloud. It was a fine game. Without rest the soldiers weakened and grew surly and disobedient, and many began to fall sick from the cold and wet and exhaustion. It was just as Chiksika had taught Tecumseh about the wolves and the bison. A wolf can hardly kill a healthy one, but sick, tired ones can be brought down at the edge of the herd.

A few days out of Cincinnati, the chief St. Clair had stopped
his army to build a fort on the east bank of the Great Miami-se-pe, a fort with three blockhouses and with a dug well inside the palisade. Tecumseh had watched the construction of this fort with interest and noted that when the army moved on, twenty soldiers were left to garrison the fort.

Then, late in the Hunter’s Moon and nearly fifty miles farther north, the army stopped and built another fort. Here something happened that filled Tecumseh’s heart with more hope for his people.

It was a windy, moonless night, cold and dank, the woods full of the rustling of dead and fallen leaves. Tecumseh stood near a huge oak tree on a rise of land between the confluence of two small streams, looking down on the fireglow in and around the new fort, when he heard from his left the call of the
andakwa.
Immediately he slipped off through the woods in that direction, knowing that something very important was happening. He had designated this bird’s call as an urgent summoning signal because the raven is seldom heard at night.

He found Stands-Between there on the slope above one of the two creeks and at once knew why his brother had summoned him: he could hear the movements of many people along the bottomland of the creek. They were moving back down the trail along which the army had come, and it seemed they were trying to go in stealth; there was no talking, just whispers and the rustle of many footsteps in the fallen leaves, the bumping of equipment, and now and then the whimper or cry of a small child, quickly muffled. Tecumseh marveled at this and wondered what was happening. Stands-Between told him as much as he had been able to observe of it.

“These are the militia soldiers whose camp was at this end of the fort. As I watched them I saw some of them picking up their things and leaving their fires. Then more did the same. I could see their camp standing almost empty, but their fires still burning. So I came this way. I found them down there by the creek, all whispering and murmuring. I think there are four hundred or five hundred of them, soldiers and women and children. When they began to move away along the creek, I called for you.”

Tecumseh smiled in the dark and thanked the Great Good Spirit for this. “So the unhappiest ones of this unhappy army have chosen to desert their war chief and sneak home! Ah, this is good!” He squeezed his brother’s arm. “Listen, brother. Will you take Thick Water and follow these and watch them? I will send Seekabo up to tell Blue Jacket what you have found. Use Thick
Water as your runner to come and tell me what these deserters do as they go down the road. Tell him I will not be hard to find because I will always be where the general’s army is. Ha! This St. Clair will be a mad chief when day comes to show him that a fourth of his army is gone! Now, my brother. I am pleased with you. Go after them now, guard your life, and may you see with the eyes of the Panther!”

I
T WAS ALMOST DAYLIGHT, AND
T
ECUMSEH STOOD WRAPPED
in his blanket against the gray morning cold, watching the smoke drift off the dying fires of the deserted part of the army camp, when he heard a sentry soldier cry out and knew that the desertion had been discovered. He smiled and shook his head. It had taken the Long Knives seven hours to learn that their farmer-soldiers had deserted, because for once Tecumseh had let the exhausted army sleep. He had let them sleep so that the deserters might be far away into the south.

There was a huge uproar around the fort, and one of Tecumseh’s scouts up in a beech tree said he could see the Long Knife general limping around waving his arms at other officers. Then there was a long period in which nothing seemed to be happening. And then at last one of the Blue-Coat officers rushed out of the fort into his part of the camp, where he shouted and waved
his
arms, and then to Tecumseh’s great joy this officer’s whole regiment, an entire half of the Blue-Coat soldiers, formed up in lines and started back down the trail in pursuit of the deserters.

At once Tecumseh sent another runner to Blue Jacket, to tell him that St. Clair’s once feared army, already a half as numerous as it was supposed to have been, now was further split into halves and now sat here with less than two thousand fighting men, still burdened with two or three hundred sick and hungry camp followers, with no supply train coming yet from the south. Let us see what this poor Long Knife chief will choose to do now, Tecumseh thought. Will he march on toward our towns or hide here in his fort until things get better and the weather gets worse? We already know he is a fool. Now let us watch and see if he is a coward as well. Whatever the general chose-to do now, he was surely defeated in his purpose, Tecumseh was certain. If he stayed and waited for his army to reunite and for supplies to arrive, winter would come and hold him in place. If he tried to march on with this divided army, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket would meet him with nearly an equal number of well-rested, well-fed warriors, hungry only for another victory over the American army.

Tecumseh was so exhilarated about the anticipated deliverance of his people that he had to force himself to withdraw from the view of the fort and get the sleep he needed.

It was not long before the general made it clear that he was a brave fool, not a cowardly fool. He marched his army away from this new fort and headed northward, going toward the headwaters of the Wabash-se-pe. At once Tecumseh sent runners ahead to tell Blue Jacket. Then with his remaining scouts he began once again to play wolf around the army herd. He and his warriors played more boldly now, letting themselves be seen, making a show of their confidence, revealing themselves on high places almost within easy rifle shot of the Long Knives, swiftly crossing and recrossing the army’s path to leave as many tracks as possible, making themselves seem more numerous than they were. Once Tecumseh turned grinning to Stands Firm and joked to him, “Brother, tell me whether I look like a wolf or a mockingbird, because I am being like both and don’t know which I am.”

“To my eyes,” Stands Firm replied with a quick laugh, “you are still a panther.”

Snows came while Tecumseh’s young men were thus harassing the soldiers. It fell and melted, then fell and stayed, and now the dispirited soldiers and their pack animals and their six heavy cannons struggled on ever more slowly, leaving as their trail a rutted, pitted road of mud-brown slush, dotted with discarded equipment. Coming along this road, Tecumseh picked up one of the cloth bags that lay in the mud and examined it. There were a few grains of cornmeal in its seams. It was the sort of bag in which the militiamen carried their rations of meal, and, he knew, they would not throw these away unless they had given up hope of getting more rations. It was a good sign of the army’s desperation and misery, and Tecumseh welcomed it. If this St. Clair believes he will arrive and plunder food at our towns, Tecumseh thought, he will learn another hard lesson.