Panther in the Sky (5 page)

H
UNDREDS OF PEOPLE CAME RUNNING OUT OF THE TOWN TO
meet Hard Striker. People had seen the sign and learned of the war chief’s new son. And so now they came running, women and children in their deerskin dresses and tunics, their faces full of happiness and curiosity, from among the bark houses and the hide-covered lean-tos, through the garden plots, around the ends of pole fences, coming down the road, calling greetings, to meet their warrior chief and his family. Behind them came warriors and chieftains, walking instead of running, as men should for the sake of their dignity, but they were walking fast and sometimes breaking into a trot in their own eagerness to know. The town lay under a haze of dust and woodsmoke, on a broad plateau above the marshy bottomlands of the Little Miami-se-pe. On the far side of the curving river rose grand, rocky bluffs crested with forest. It was a beautiful town, of several hundred silver-gray, bark-covered, loaf-shaped
wigewas
and peak-roofed council houses, a town built among the giant elms, maples, and oaks that grew on the plain. The packed-earth streets between the houses were wide and striped by shadows of the leafless trees in the sunlight, and there were hundreds of Shawnees moving in the streets. The air was full of the aromas of cooking, of baking meal-cakes, corn chowders, and roasting meats, and the drone of thousands of voices. The whole town was vibrant with the excitement of this great gathering of the septs. From within the heart of the town came drumbeats, the chattering of rattles, the songs of wooden flutes, the yips and laughter of many children.

Hard Striker rode at the head of his family, grinning, his hand held high. His wife with her new baby on her arm rode wrapped in a blanket, lying on a travois that trailed behind the horse her son Chiksika was leading, and her daughter walked beside the travois. The girl was dutiful and stayed beside her mother, though in her eagerness to be among the young people from the many towns, she seemed to be almost dancing as she walked. Her face was smooth, russet, and her small, even teeth gleamed white. Her eyes were as brown and big as buckeye nuts. The long, shiny, blue-black braid of her thick hair swayed behind her as she walked, reaching her waist, and around her head was a strand of mottled-glass trade beads. Sky Watcher was already aware that she was beautiful, and she was forever happy and grateful for it. There was seldom a morning when this girl awoke without a smile already on her face, because everything in her life was as good as it could be.

Now the people were surrounding the family, running back to the travois to see Turtle Mother and her new child, patting their hands together and dancing around, crying out like birds in their delight. “A-hi-ee! A boy, then!” “And you saw the light go over?” “Will he be named ‘Flying Star’?” Turtle Mother smiled her lovely, wise smile at the horde of faces above her and answered “Yes” or “Maybe” to their queries, sometimes reaching up to touch the hands of friends.

Hard Striker rode in a glory of pride, saluting the approaching chiefs while with his sinewy left arm he controlled his stallion, which was excited by the milling crowd and tried to prance and caper. Hard Striker was proud of his new son’s portentous birth and of his handsome family. He rejoiced in the warmth of the greetings. To a Shawnee, the love and respect of one’s tribesmen were all the wealth one could need. The bond of kinship among the People was a world in itself, and within a sept this bond was so strong and all-embracing that the whole sept was, in effect, a family,
the
family. No Shawnee child whose parents were killed by war or disease ever had to become an orphan, because all adults were fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts to all children. The only unbearable punishment for any crime was banishment from the tribe. It seldom happened. Death was preferable. It was considered better to be a dead person than a living nonperson, which one became if he was put out of the tribe. Thus in the round wholeness of the living tribe there was a warmth that made even the hardness and hunger of winter bearable. Life was never easy or certain for the red men, especially now that the white men were unsettling their world, but there was always the great comfort of not having to be alone against the hardships of the world. So whenever Hard Striker returned like this into the presence of the People, his heart would glow in his breast. And now it was especially so because of what had happened under the shooting star.

Now he saw Black Snake, his main chieftain, coming down the road toward him, cloaked in a red blanket, his roach headdress bristling, one brawny, braceleted arm raised in greeting. With Black Snake walked the great Black Fish, village chief of Chillicothe, a compact, graceful man whose bearing made him seem much taller than he was. Also coming was a large, broad-faced elder with a feather-tipped staff in his hand, his wrinkled visage very intense. Ah! It was Penegashega himself, Change-of-Feathers, the Chalagawtha shaman whom Hard Striker had intended to seek right away, and Change-of-Feathers in his own
eagerness had come out to meet him. Surely it is a great matter, this of my son’s name-sign, the chief thought, if Change-of-Feathers comes forth at once from the council fires to speak to me of it. Look at the thought in his eyes! There is much there! Surely, then, this is a most important thing that has come upon us!

Hard Striker reined in and dismounted when he reached the shaman and the chiefs. His family’s entourage stopped behind him. Black Fish took his hand, and his thin, hard lips seemed to melt suddenly with the warmth of his smile. “Welcome, my brother, to Chillicothe. My people are honored.”

“Black Fish, my brother. May we do great good in this council. May Weshemoneto smile on this town.”

Now Change-of-Feathers took Hard Striker’s hand, and his eyes searched Hard Striker’s face.

“First Warrior! Always I rejoice to see my son the Kispoko, and now on this day, more than ever before.”

“Father, I thank you. When I come through the trees and see this great town, my soul sings as if I were coming home. And now on this day more than ever I am happy to see my wise father and take his hand. You do me honor to come forth and welcome my family.”

“When the flying star went over, I saw in the eyes of a dream that a child was born in its very light. Was my vision true?”

“Exactly. Within the same breath, both came, the star and my son. All my family remarked on it with wonder.”

Change-of-Feathers, plainly much moved, took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder, and tears brimmed in his eyes. He held Hard Striker’s hand fervently in his own. Change-of-Feathers’ hands were soft and loose-fleshed, like his large body, but vibrantly strong, and one felt a living power flowing from their touch. Never a warrior, Change-of-Feathers had an air of gentleness about him, and his face, though manly, was tender and wise and expressive, rather like a grandmother’s. A row of puncture tattoos ran from ear to ear across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Change-of-Feathers went back now to greet Turtle Mother and to look at the infant. He studied it, murmuring something to himself. He put his soft hand on Turtle Mother’s head, then stroked the baby’s brow, opened its eyelids, and turned again to Hard Striker. “My son,” he said, “the coming of the flying star was a good sign for these councils, but it was yet more, because a son was born to our war chief. No other child was born in our nation on that night, from what we have heard.” The people
were quiet now, Black Fish and Black Snake standing with them listening, the women and children listening from nearby. A cool breeze sighed in the grasses and the weed stalks in the meadow and shook the feathers of Change-of-Feathers’ staff. “Listen,” the medicine man went on. “It means more than I can yet explain. Eagle Speaker and I have talked of this. Eagle Speaker too had a dream.” Eagle Speaker was a seer, a younger man than Change-of-Feathers and a Bear Walker, one of the Shape Shifters through whom messages were often given to the People. “In the dream of Eagle Speaker, there was a long-tailed star in the sky for a year and then the earth shook, throwing things down. I must go out to fast and listen before I can know all it means. Cornstalk himself wants to know what they mean. He waits to see you in his lodge, and to learn of the child. For the naming of your son, you should know this:

“That passing light was the color of the panther’s eye. Several times our fathers have seen such stars. It is believed that it is the Eye of the Panther that forever moves in the night sky. This child’s eyes have that color.

“You are the chief of the Kispoko, called the Panther sept. You were traveling, passing from one place to another, when it came. That, too, has meaning. We see a panther only when he crosses our path. The panther says, ‘
Nila ni tha’mthka:
I cross someone’s path.’ And so we call the passing panther Tha’mthka. Think of this. I will tell you more when I can.

“But come. Cornstalk waits to welcome you, and the councils can begin. Hard Striker, my son, I have great joy in the birth of your boy. Great leaders are given to the People in times of the greatest need. By our law, only a Chalagawtha or a Thawegila can be the chief of all this nation, and your son is Kispoko. But in a time of war, the war chief is powerful. The whites will force us to wage war or surrender. A time of greatest need is coming. We shall see. Our lives are in the hands of Weshemoneto. Perhaps he will send this war chief across the path of the whitefaces. Come now.”

Hard Striker, as if in a trance of thought, swung onto the back of his horse, and all the people began moving back toward Chillicothe, following their chiefs and the shaman, the young ones running and skipping, barely aware of all these portents. And as they paraded into the crowded town, Hard Striker was deciding something. He looked over the heads of the people and saw the hazy blue bluffs looming above the town, beyond the river. He saw this with his eyes, but in his soul he was seeing the panther. He had
already decided the name he would give his son. Tha’mthka. Tecumseh. The Panther Crossing the Sky. The Shooting Star.

And his daughter. One could change one’s name if another name became more right. Sky Watcher had been a good name for her until now. But she had first seen the shooting star, and she had helped this marked child into the world. She herself was already blessed with uncommon goodness and wisdom, the guardian virtues. She was most important to this child’s life. A truer name for her would be Star Watcher, Tecumapese.

S
OMETIMES IN SPRING
T
URTLE
M
OTHER WOULD HANG THE
cradleboard from a limber bough near the garden clearing. Breezes would move the bough and cause the cradleboard to turn slowly and bob gently in the sun-dappled shade, and the baby would see the green of leaves, the golden flashes of sunshine, blue sky, red birds darting, women’s brown bodies bending and moving in the bean fields and vegetable gardens, all this revolving, everything in motion, the colors and the songs and laughter of the women and the twittering of birds sometimes making him squeal and chortle, sometimes lulling him to sleep. Days passed and seasons turned.

Or sometimes she carried the cradleboard on her back while she worked, and here too was motion, motion as she hoed amid the hot, summer-green smell of bean and corn leaves, motion as she pounded grain to meal or scraped hides to make leather beside the door of her husband’s lodge and talked with her daughter or told her stories of the People or sang with her, and the baby knew their two voices among the hundreds of voices in the town, and he was content when their two voices were calm and happy and near. He seldom cried, for the motions and the sounds and the colors of the peaceful days delighted all his growing perceptions. In his soft skullcase moved the surd, formless billows of baby
thought, the gradual coalescence of patterns and recognitions, of needs and satisfactions, always with the motions, the nearnesses, the sounds. His mother’s round, brown, dark-nippled breasts hung over him, her hand released him from the straits of the cradleboard, fondled him, cleansed him, and anointed him with oil, delighting his naked skin, and then the oozy nipple would meet his sucking lips, and he would nourish himself blindly like a root in the earth, lulled by the oldest of all the sounds, her pumping heart. If he opened his eyes, he would see her glinting eyes above him, her large hand moving slowly to discourage some buzzing, tickling fly, and beyond, the leaves moving, the clouds moving. Or he would watch his own fat little hand clench and open or experimentally extend a finger at a time, perhaps knowing or perhaps not knowing that it was a part of him instead of one of the familiar moving things of the sensual world around him.

And sometimes the face of his sister, Star Watcher, would move into the round of his little world and loom before him with its white smile and its songs and its cooing and clucking sounds. Her face was as welcome as his mother’s, her caresses as kind, her skin as warm, her voice as musical; the only difference was that her little nipples did not give food.

And he came to know other faces, too: his father’s, usually high above him smiling down, the eagle feather in his hair translucent with sunlight, the silver bobs of his earrings glittering just out of reach, the deep roll of his voice filling the world. And his brother’s face, a different smile, dark hair without a feather or other ornaments, and the funny popping sounds he would make with his lips to start the baby giggling. Still the days passed and the seasons turned.

Then came days when he was kept close to his mother’s skin inside a musky-smelling animal hide, dark with interesting and tickly short hairs on it, and when the robe was opened the air on his skin was cold, a sensation new and needing to be understood. In those days there was always the sharp odor of smoke, and sometimes he would stay enchanted for long times by the light and movement of flames, contemplating fire and the moving shadows it made above him, hearing its soft or sharp little sounds. The fire was another familiar to him, always there, moving and making sounds, like another member of this family. Sometimes at night he would wake up, and though he could hear his mother’s heartbeat and her breathing, and feel the warmth of her skin, he could not see her or anyone else in the darkness of their
wigewa,
no one except the fire. It was always there, though sometimes it
would be burned down to silent, shimmering embers, and though it looked different then from the flames, it still had motion and he would recognize it, and make sounds to it, wordless talk in the cold darkness between two warm and living things, baby and fire.